Outcome

Most of the people you know on any level beyond the mere familiarity of acquaintance are interested in outcome. Not surprisingly then, many of these individuals are writers or engage in some form of art whether it is photography, ceramics, music (which surely includes dance), or acting. Others, no strangers to reading and art, pursue their quest for outcome as scholars, scientists, attorneys, community activists. Only this morning one such friend spoke to you of his pursuit for outcome as it related to translations, his energy effervescing behind his need to get down his espresso and bridge the distance between the coffee shop where you breakfasted and the university where his class was scheduled for 9:30. Another such friend had no class but was interested in getting to his lab where he was pursuing a project that involved mud, a project that literally had his whiskers twitching.

It is your observation that those who are not interested directly in tracking outcomes born of their own projects are nevertheless interested in the outcome of baseball games, competitive celebrity-wannabe shows, even elections. Some of us like to look to outcomes as portents of extensive if not massive future behavior. In other words, outcomes as building blocks for additional building blocks. At this moment, the political climate and a certain N-sampling of past history suggest that after Barack Obama's decisive victory, he is likely to lose ground in the forthcoming bi-election. You even recall your hard-nosed political science instructor pronouncing: "The party that wins the election loses the bi-election."

You also notice more so now than you did as an undergraduate the way bias invades expectations (and hopes) related to outcomes. It is a fact that there have been six special congressional elections since Barack Obama's inauguration as POTUS, each of these won handily by a Democrat. This aggregate result at least stands as a rebuke to the general view that the 2010 elections will be seriously bad news for the Democratic Party and President Obama. We are all of us, of course, our expectations of outcome set on high flame, awaiting the actual results.

Story is your focus in these vagrant paragraphs. By definition and convention, story is an outcome in which contrary agendas clash, where behavior and sometimes ingenuity trump logic, and where more experienced writers need to discover again that the most emotionally laden and satisfying outcomes have their origins in listening to the characters they have created.

Take the leap with me to late sixteenth century Prague, where Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel created a creature out of mud,a golem, brought him to life by inscribing the Hebrew word for truth on the creature's head, then instructed the creature to defend the Jewish community against a virulent wave of anti-Semitism. After the Golem had completed its mission, the Rabbi deleted the first letter of the Hebrew word for truth from its head, leaving the word met, which is Hebrew for death, whereupon the golem crumbled to the clay from which it came. This story is presented as legend just as, later, the invention of a story about a particular Robin of Locksley morphed into Robin Hood, each tale having an outcome that at least temporarily provided satisfaction and perhaps even inspiration to the listener. Farther back in time came the story of The Iliad which, so far as we know, may have happened exactly as described in the epic poem of the Homer poets, giving at least an accurate picture of what societies were like at one time and also providing some an inspiration for survival and perseverance and observation of then prevalent custom.

Outcomes are risky business in general; no one can be completely happy with them. If they are too bright and cheerful, they are seen as bubbly optimism. If they are as laden with implication as, say, Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit, they may be seen as overly grim, cynical reflections on such well-trod themes as The Meaning of Life. Outcomes have led Barnaby Conrad to observe (more than once, alas) that stories about animals are fated to unhappy endings. Today, while making that observation in relation to Madison, a much loved gray parrot who lost out to a marauding rat, that human life was similarly targeted.

And yet we persist in pursuing human affairs, even ones we consider relatively dumb, drawn about the metaphorical camp fire of the oral tale or the reading lamp of the solitary reader in the sure knowledge that the behavior of the invented individuals is of greater significance than the final outcome. In the end, we all of us, as Jack London's character did in "To Build a Fire," run out of matches. A heavy collection of snow on a branch above us melts from the fire we have created, causing it to drop precipitously, extinguishing the fire we labored to create. Speaking of London, he true enough gave us "To Build a Fire," but he also gave us a shot at a way out with another, lesser known story, "A Loss of Face."

No Exit: Sartre Style and Bush Style

Just short of being old enough to collect Social Security, Jean-Paul Sartre's play, No Exit, had a cast of four and one set.

Of the four cast members, one, the Valet, is used to usher the other three into a small, windowless room which these three come to realize is literally Hell. The remaining three are Garcin, the man; a coward and a bit of a bully. His two roommates, with whom he believes he is destined to spend eternity, are Ines, attractive so far as Garcin is concerned, but unavailable to him for two salient reasons, her sexual orientation and her honesty.

The remaining member of this otherworldly menage is Estelle, the trophy wife of a wealthy man, her overt beauty in constant battle with her own deceitful and shallow nature. We are given a few clues about the Valet, but must decide each for himself, if his job is hereditary, voluntary, or a punishment.

Point-of-view seems to go to Garcin although, on any scale of admirability, Ines is the most willing to see things as they are and get on with them.

By play's end, we have come to know why each of the principals is in Hell; we also get some individualized sense of what each anticipates in the way of cosmic punishment, of karma, if you will. 

Garcin loudly demands that the one door to their room be opened, which would allow each of them to move out and beyond to whatever came next. The stunning dramatic irony of the conclusion arrives when Garcin no sooner demands the door be opened than, indeed, it does open. But neither Garcin, Ines, or Estelle opt to leave.

An amalgamated product of Sartre's Existentialism philosophy, the amphetamines he took to allow him longer access to his teeming brain (see last blog about Keats and his memorable sonnet), his tempestuous romantic/intellectual relationship with Simone De Beauvoir, and the then zeitgeist which featured the Bunker Mentality and then the death of the Third Reich, No Exit has become an archetype of circumstance and interpretation.

With this background as subtext, come with me to a fictional setting at a large ballroom, where hundreds of couples are dancing or simply enjoying the music of a live band. In this midst, a nattily dressed master or mistress of ceremonies calmly advances on the podium, signals the band to silence, then calmly indicates the several convenient exits before inviting all present to move calmly but purposefully to one of these exits because there is a fire on the roof of significant enough intensity to pose an immediate danger to all. And suppose a group of young men complain bitterly at the cost of rental tuxedos and the expenses related to this event of pleasure, and insist on another dance. And suppose those in attendance vote for another surge of dancing and screw the effects of the fire.

You can see the emerging metaphor for our time emerging.

Iraq.

No Exit. This is particularly good metaphor because in the past elections, enough of us have loudly but legally, repeat legally, demanded that the door be opened. Indeed the door was opened.

Why are we still inside? Why haven't we packed up our things and begun to leave? Remember, we voted legally (in most places) to undo something we initiated illegally. Why do we to this day persist?

It is the f-word, filibuster. The Republicans, oh so outraged when Doctor Frist was Senate Majority leader, actually spoke of setting forth new rules that would obviate cloture votes, and now shamelessly use it in the same cowardly manner Garcin performed in No Exit.

Sartre has left us with the quintessential archetype of the times. The door had been opened long ago when cooler heads and a fleet of helicopters got us out of Viet Nam, allowing that beleaguered country to get on with its life and, in the bargain, send waves of manicurists and pedicurists to this country, where they have industriously opened salons in every strip mall except those in Utah. The door was opened wider in November of 2006.

Since then, we have had surges, General Petraeus, Fred Thompson, and Rudy Giuliani, he of the twenty-three tax cuts while mayor of NYC.

All we want is out.

The roof is on fire and it will cave in and all we want is out.