Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates Page 10

  Chimed Groucho, “What’s the capital of North Dakota?”

  But back to the nineteenth century, when the Society for Psychical Research in England and its American affiliate, the American Society for Psychical Research (both of which still exist), approached the subject of the spirit world with fear and trembling—not because they were afraid of ghosts, but because the academic reputations of their members were at stake. They clearly saw it was in their own best interest to be as skeptical as possible of every claim of every medium.

  Sure enough, tippity-tap, Madame Blavatsky was exposed as a fraud, despite the fact that she had long resisted investigation by the Societies by claiming that her work was best carried out in a gilded shrine she had built in Madras, India. That shrine allegedly included tiny drawers in which “spirit letters” from the dead would suddenly appear. But Richard Hodgson, an Australian philosophy student of James’s British colleague, Henry Sidgwick, gained access to the shrine and discovered double-sided drawers through which Mme. Blavatsky’s servants were passing the letters. Seems Madame B. was counterfeiting missives from the deceased by finding letters they had written while still on “this side,” steaming them open, thereby garnering personal information, resealing them, then imitating the handwriting of the dear departed to create the “spirit letters” full of private info. Thus did Madame Blavatsky anticipate communications theorist Marshall McLuhan’s immortal words, “The medium is the message.”

  SCIENCE, SÉANCE, AS LONG AS YOU’RE HEALTHY

  A ventriloquist goes to see his agent, desperate for work. And the agent says he’s so sorry, but there isn’t much demand for his act anymore, what with live variety shows gone, Ed Sullivan gone. About the only advice he has is the same he gave to another ventriloquist client—open a séance business.

  So the ventriloquist thinks about it, finally finds a storefront for a good price, and puts up his shingle.The first customer who walks in is a bereaved widow. She wants to talk to her recently departed husband. “How much does it cost?”

  The ventriloquist says: “Well, for $50, you can ask him any question you want, and he’ll reply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ with one knock on the table or two knocks, respectively. For $150, you can ask him any question you want, and he will answer you verbally. And then there’s my $500 special.”

  The woman asks, “What’s that?”

  The ventriloquist says, “Well, you can ask him any question you want, he’ll answer you verbally, and all the while I’ll be drinking a glass of water.”

  THE RIGHTS OF THE DEPARTED

  Lost in discussions of séances is any consideration for the dead respondents. Why do they have to appear on demand? Might they not have busy schedules too? Aren’t they at least entitled to caller ID?

  The longtime waiter was mourned by his customers after he passed away. So beloved was he that several patrons organized a séance in the restaurant to try to contact him.

  They all held hands in the dark around the table as the medium called out:“Snark Withers! I summon the spirit of Snark Withers!”

  Silence.

  “Snark Withers!” the medium called out again.“I summon the spirit of Snark Withers!”

  Once again, silence. The people around the table grew restless. Sensing a problem, the medium bellowed, “I command the spirit of Snark Withers to come forward!”

  And sure enough, an apparition appeared floating above the table, and all recognized the image of their lost friend.

  “Great to see you!” said one of the patrons. “But why did it take so long for you to come?”

  Turning up his nose in disgust, the ghost replied,“This isn’t my table!”

  Yet both Sidgwick and James continued to hold open the possibility that among all the frauds there might be some genuine mediums with a genuine power to contact the dead—5 percent, they speculated. (Don’t ask.) One medium they considered very promising was Eusapia Palladino, an Italian who would become sexually aroused when she entered the trance state and curl up on the laps of male participants. (Thus the expression, “The medium is the massage.”)

  But sure enough, German-American psychologist Hugo Munsterberg caught Eusapia cheating: she wriggled out of her shoe, which was resting on his foot, and with her bare foot moved a small table behind her. James was furious at Munsterberg. Yes, Eusapia had cheated here and there, but that still didn’t explain all of the parapsychological phenomena that occurred when she was closely monitored. Apparently, Eusapia brought out James’s tender-mindedness. It was that lap thing that did it.1

  HOW WOULD WILLIAM JAMES CALL THIS ONE?

  For months, Mrs. Pitzel had been nagging her husband to go with her to the séance parlor of Madame Freda. “Milty, she’s a real gypsy, and she brings the voices of the dead from the other world. We all talk to them! Last week I talked with my mother, may she rest in peace. Milty, for twenty dollars you can talk to your grampy whom you miss so much!”

  Milton Pitzel could not resist her appeal. At the very next séance at Madame Freda’s Séance Parlor, Milty sat under the colored light at the green table, holding hands with the person on each side.All were humming,“Oooom, oooom, tonka tooom.”

  Madame Freda, her eyes lost in trance, was making passes over a crystal ball.“My medium . . .Vashtri,” she called.“Come in.Who is that with you? Who? Mr. Pitzel? Milton Pitzel’s grandfather?”

  Milty swallowed the lump in his throat and called, “Grampy?”

  “Ah, Milteleh?” a thin voice quavered.

  “Yes! Yes!” cried Milty. “This is your Milty! Grampy—zayde—are you happy in the other world?”

  “Milteleh, I am in bliss. With your bubbie together, we laugh, we sing.We gaze upon the shining face of the Lord!”

  A dozen more questions did Milty ask of his zayde, and each question did his zayde answer, until, “So now, Milteleh, I have to go. The angels are calling. Just one more question I can answer. Ask. Ask.”

  “Zayde,” sighed Milty, “so when did you learn to speak English?”

  REFLECTING ON THE DEAD

  Leave it to the New Agers to channel the rap-tap-tap movement into a popular twenty-first-century consumer item, the psychomanteum. This is a dimly lit room where, for a fee, one can gaze into a large mirror, fall into a trance, and commune with the dead. Psychomantea date back to the ancient Greeks, who would gaze into reflecting pools to summon up the spirit world.

  Some modern psychologists insist that the whole deal is just a hallucination resulting from a form of visual sense deprivation produced in a monochromatic environment devoid of a horizon—the so-called Ganzfeld Effect. Yeah, tell that to the folks at psychomanteum .org, where a guest mirror-gazer wrote:I prayed that God would let Blu [my cat] manifest if he wanted, and then I saw white swirling energy. I felt like this may be Blu trying to show himself. I watched this and then drifted into sleep where I dreamed I was Blu chasing a rabbit.

  Ganzfeld, my foot!

  So, Daryl, you may want to share some of this information with Gladys.

  As if! Ever since I’ve been hanging out with you guys, she’d rather talk with Aunt Edna than with me.

  · V ·

  Death as a Lifestyle Choice

  Did you ever get the feeling that you wanted to go,

  But you wanted to stay,

  But you wanted to go?

  —Jimmy Durante as Banjo singing in The Man Who Came to Dinner

  “Well, finally—a man who gets it!”

  { 11 }

  Beating Death to the Punch Line

  Jeez, Daryl, what’s going on here? We admit we hardly know you, but you struck us as kind of an upbeat guy. So what’s the deal with the gun barrel in your mouth?

  Aargh . . . wigos . . . phip . . .

  What’s that you’re saying, Daryl? We must say, it’s hard to understand you with that thing in your mouth. Would you mind taking it out so we can talk this thing through?

  Snrgg . . . filtm . . . snork . . .

  Just hold on there, Daryl. Bef
ore you pull that trigger, would you mind answering a couple of questions of, well, a philosophical nature? We promise not to take up too much of your time—although from one perspective, you do have time to spare as compared to an eternity of nothingness. And, no, we ’re not going to try to talk you out of anything. No way—it’s 100 percent your decision. We ’re just gathering data—you know, on the existential meaning of life, the morality of self-annihilation, exception clauses in your life insurance policy . . . that sort of thing.

  First, we ’d like to congratulate you on confronting what the twentieth-century French existentialist Albert Camus called the ultimate metaphysical question. As Al put it in the first lines of his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”1

  What Al is saying is that once a person is conscious of suicide as an alternative to hanging in there, and that person chooses not to commit suicide—unlike, say, you, Daryl—he has consciously opted for life. His or her life, that is. He has taken the first step in accepting full responsibility for his existence. He is because he has chosen to be. In a sense, he has begun the lifelong task of creating himself.

  Why, you may ask, would he want to do that? Actually, you, Daryl, flexing your trigger finger as you are, may already have answered that question to your own satisfaction: to wit, there is no good reason to want to continue creating your life. But on the off chance that you haven’t given this question its full due, we suggest that now might be a good time to give it one more go-around.

  Camus doesn’t exactly offer an upbeat reason for choosing not to off yourself. He thought life was totally without meaning in any ordinary sense. In fact, the title character in The Myth of Sisyphus spends his days pushing a huge, heavy stone up the hill all day, only to have it roll back down. Not a real fulfilling life, eh? So you would think that Camus would agree with the graffito on the bathroom wall of our favorite existential coffee shop: “Life’s the joke; suicide’s just the punch line.” But no, old Al comes out against suicide.

  In the concluding sentence of the essay, Camus writes, “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Why happy? Perhaps, like the antihero of Camus’s The Stranger just before his execution, it is because he “opens his heart to the benign indifference of the universe.” Like, life’s absurd, so death’s absurd—pretty funny, huh? It ’s all a cosmic joke, so what the hell, party on!

  PEGGY LEE NAILS THE COSMIC JOKE

  In her 1969 hit “Is That All There Is?” Ms. Lee spoke for an entire generation of absurdists who like to party.

  When I was 12 years old, my father took me to a circus, the greatest show on earth.

  There were clowns and elephants and dancing bears.

  And a beautiful lady in pink tights flew high above our heads.

  And so I sat there watching the marvelous spectacle.

  I had the feeling that something was missing.

  I don’t know what, but when it was over,

  I said to myself, “Is that all there is to a circus?”

  Is that all there is, is that all there is?

  If that ’s all there is, my friends, then let ’s keep dancing.

  Let ’s break out the booze and have a ball,

  If that ’s all there is.

  I know what you must be saying to yourselves,

  If that ’s the way she feels about it, why doesn’t she just end it all?

  Oh, no, not me. I’m in no hurry for that final disappointment,

  For I know just as well as I’m standing here talking to you,

  When that final moment comes and I’m breathing my last breath, I’ll be saying to myself,

  Is that all there is, is that all there is?

  If that ’s all there is, my friends, then let ’s keep dancing.

  Let ’s break out the booze and have a ball,

  If that ’s all there is.

  This existentialist anthem was written by none other than Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller of “Hound Dog” fame. More surprisingly, Stoller says the song was inspired by the story “Disillusionment,” by Thomas Mann.

  If the party-on argument doesn’t do it for you, Daryl, consider Camus’s more serious take on suicide: to kill oneself is a failure of moral courage, an abdication of our responsibility to embrace the absurdity of life.

  Does this resonate for you, Daryl?

  Aargh . . . wigos . . . phip . . .

  Are you back beating that dead horse again, Daryl? Or are you saying that you’ve been reading Goethe and you think suicide has an artistic, tortured-soul kind of panache to it? God knows, the publication of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther sparked a conflagration of romantic suicides all over Europe. That’s late-eighteenth-century romanticism for you.

  Niggum . . . flirp . . .

  Still with us, Daryl? We do wish you’d speak up. You’re harder to understand than Demosthenes.

  Oh, we guess you’re saying that we don’t comprehend your own individual plight, the particular set of circumstances that has led you to this pistol-in-mouth existential position. Ex-cuse us!

  Seriously, Daryl, is it that you have a terminal illness that is causing you both physical pain and mental anguish? Is that why you want to end it all?

  If so, it may be comforting to know that you are in good philosophical company. The ancient Stoics taught that the goal of life is “flourishing” or “living in agreement with nature.” So if you’re no longer flourishing, it’s okay to take your own life. As Cicero put it, “When a man’s circumstances contain a preponderance of things in accordance with nature, it is appropriate for him to remain alive; when he possesses or sees in prospect a majority of the contrary things, it is appropriate for him to depart from life.”2

  Who knew Dr. Kevorkian was a Stoic? Dr. K. (or, as some would have it, Dr. D.) also raises a more complex question of whether it’s okay to help someone else commit suicide. Forget about the legal issue; morally, is assisted suicide a supreme act of love or is it perilously close to murder? Or, as situation ethicists would ask, “Doesn’t it all depend on the situation?”

  The Stoic Seneca even uses the words that the modern right-to-die folks have appropriated: “quality of life.” Seneca wrote, “The wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can. . . . [He] always reflects concerning the quality, not the quantity, of his life. As soon as there are many events in his life that give him trouble and disturb his peace of mind, he sets himself free.”3

  The contemporary philosopher Bill Maher put it more succinctly, if a bit more theologically: “I believe Dr. Kevorkian is on to something. I think he’s great. Because suicide is our way of saying to God, ‘You can’t fire me. I quit.’ ”

  A SPECIAL CASE OF SUICIDE: WHAT WOULD YOU DIE FOR?

  I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country. Nathan Hale

  This Joan Rivers Diamond Dust Nail Collection is to die for. The Shopping Channel

  What would you die for?

  Yes, we’re talking to you, Daryl. We are appealing to your transcendental values. And to help you put the question in perspective, we offer you the following peer pressure:

  “Before we try assisted suicide, Mrs. Rose,

  let’s give the aspirin a chance.”

  According to one survey,4 68 percent of respondents in a multiple-choice poll answered that they would sacrifice their life for “My children,” followed by a second-place tie at 48 percent between “My wife/husband ” and “To save the world.” Other responses were “Freedom of knowledge and learning for all people on earth” (40 percent), “Freedom and democracy” (36 percent), and “Freedom from censorship of news” (32 percent).

  What’s that, Daryl? You can’t quite picture a situation where the choice would be between freedom of knowledge and learning for all people on earth, and your life?

  Well, uh, let’s say there was this cargo plane car
rying fifty thousand complete sets of the Harvard Classics that was headed for the Congo and you are riding in the back with the books when you see the pilot drop dead at the controls . . . and . . . and . . . Uh, can we get back to you on this, Daryl?

  Because there were only twenty-five respondents in this survey and each respondent chose an average of 2.7 things they would die for, we may want to label this particular group “High Die-ers.” Yet great men and women throughout history have chosen death rather than abandon their cause.

  It could be argued that most soldiers—suicide bombers and kamikaze pilots excepted—don’t actually choose to die for their country so much as choose to risk death for their country, a very admirable but somewhat lower level of commitment. But Socrates, according to Plato’s Apology, was offered acquittal if he would stop corrupting the youth of Athens with philosophy and refused, knowing that the alternative was death. How about Joan of Arc? Arguably, Joan’s death was voluntary, in the sense that she must have known it was inevitable when she launched her career as a cross-dressing warrior in the fifteenth century.

  Some philosophers have weighed in on the subject of giving one’s life for a cause or an ideal or another person, but on the whole they’ve been a pretty uninspiring lot. Bertrand Russell, for instance, said, “I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.” French philosopher and leather queen Michel Foucault said, “To die for the love of boys: what could be more beautiful?” But Epicurus (the ancient Greek philosopher, not the recipe website) had a somewhat more profound take: he said a wise man is sometimes willing to die for his friend. That’s a rather surprising sentiment from someone who argued that all our actions spring from the desire to maximize our own pleasure. That ’s partly because Eppy didn’t really think death was a big whoop. “Death is nothing to us,” he wrote, “since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.” Don’t worry, be happy.