Mars

Yesterday, in postcard living...

I'm nearing the end of my first year of the two-year interfaith/interspiritual seminary program at One Spirit Learning Alliance, which has been wonderful and validating in many I-suppose-predictable ways - hooray for like-minded English-speaking friends! - but also in this completely unexpected one:

My mentor in the program, who is Swiss and lives in the French part of Switzerland but attended the seminary program when she was living in the U.S., had a sudden inspiration during our call last month. "You feel oppressed by Switzerland, right? Have you ever heard of the book Mars? Changed my life when I was a teenager..." (This is not a direct quote; it went something like that.)

I felt a little bad that I'd apparently done so much bitching about Switzerland that she thought I felt oppressed, but now that you mention it...

I checked it out from the library.

Mars is not, as one might assume, science fiction. It's a book-length last testament written by one Fritz Zorn (Zorn = anger, fury), real name Fritz Angst (Angst = anxiety, fear), who was born in 1944 to a wealthy family on the "gold coast" of Lake Zürich (so named both because it's the side of the lake that gets the most sun and correspondingly the one where the incomes are higher...though everything is relative, of course). He did well in school, went to university, got a doctorate in Romance languages, found an apartment in Zurich and settled into a job teaching French and Spanish. Then, at age 30, he found a lump on his throat: cancer. In the two years between his diagnosis and his death, he wrote the manuscript for Mars in three parts - and received the news that it had been accepted for publication the day before he died.

Given this tragic backstory it's hard to see how the book could be entertaining reading, but it is. The author comes to see his cancer as a metaphor for his bourgeois upbringing - except I don't think he'd agree with the term metaphor; from his point of view his upbringing is his cancer. The fact that we Americans don't even have a word for bourgeois maybe reflects how little we've grappled with the idea, and perhaps explains why the New York Times review by Willard Gaylin (of the English translation of Mars when it came out in 1982) is simultaneously scathing and unintentionally entertaining as the reviewer manages to miss the point entirely.

Exhibit A:

With Fritz Zorn being a pseudonym (meaning ''Angry Fritz'') and the author now dead, a reviewer is released from the normal compassion toward the dying and solicitude toward the innocent.

Dude. Really? Exhibit B: 

No dying person need apologize for anything that he does or says in private to relieve the degradation of chronic suffering, or for anything that helps him to accommodate to that which is inconceivable to most of us, the termination of ourselves. But why should this be presented to the public at large? Why should this be taken seriously enough to be published? The answer is beyond me.

Well then. Possibly the English translation was bad? But to be fair, the forward to the German version, written by Adolf Muschg, also engages in some baffling navel-gazing about whether or not the manuscript should be considered "literature." I suspect that if some author had invented the character Fritz Zorn and written this book in his name, no one would bother themselves with that question - what a touching, insightful work! But the fact that the book is autobiographical makes one squirmy. It would be so much more comfortable to have a layer of abstraction between us and the depiction of our society as a cancer. Which...only proves the point.

Mars became a cult hit in the 80s and (here I'm wildly speculating) as the youth of the 80s got their own PhDs and teaching jobs, the kind of book you had to read in high school in the 90s. These days, based on how difficult it was for me to find a copy, I gather that it's gone out of style. When I asked [my very limited number of] Swiss friends about it, the consensus seemed to be that it was about an oppressive society of manners very particular to the post-war gold coast of Lake Zurich that doesn't exist any more, and so presumably isn't killing anyone.

But I filled eight pages with quotations I wanted to save, and I'm sure that wasn't all of them. Part of this was certainly the author's lucid and hilarious satire of Swiss manners, which in my experience still very much exist:

In connection with this, it must be said that not only was saying no an impossibility, but often saying anything at all was difficult beyond all reason. Anyone who said anything had to be aware that the others wanted and needed to reply with a yes, so that out of sensitivity we avoided all statements to which the others might have found it difficult to say yes naturally. When it came to saying whether you liked something, a book for example, you needed, as in a card game, to first consider the possible reactions of others before playing your card, lest you run the risk of saying something that was not sure to receive general approval. Or we withheld our verdict in the hope that someone else would dare to come forward first and give his opinion, which we could then applaud. We waited, therefore, for someone to finally let the cat out of the bag and say something was, for example, "nice." Then we all thought it was "beautiful", even "wonderful" or "great." But if the speaker had said "not nice," we would have agreed with him and found it "not nice at all" or even "disgusting."

omg this. I cannot tell you how crazy this game drives me. The number of times I've been in a meeting in which everyone is nodding their heads enthusiastically in agreement with some demonstrably ridiculous statement (and everyone knows it's ridiculous, but you can't be the one not nodding!), or been pressured into expressing an opinion on something I don't even *have* an opinion on just so my conversation partner can agree with me or, worse, disagree in a way that sounds like they're agreeing? UGH. The famous Swiss rule-by-consensus is so much less impressive in this light.

Or (talking about a visit by someone higher up the social ladder, the pastor or the mayor for example):

Even the tone of conversation between parents and children had to be different, more forced and unnatural, in the presence of respected figures like this. Everyone had a role to play, and in order that my brother and I could also participate in the role-playing, our parents spoke to us as if we were different children.

I've bitched about this before even on this very blog, surely. Role playing is so. critical. here. And probably it's not not-important in the U.S. (or...it's differently important I think; that's another post), but when you're thrown into a society where sticking to the script is this critical and no one gives you the script...you're doomed.

Except you might also be doomed when someone *does* give you the script, and that's the whole point of the book. Fritz Zorn looks back on his 30 years of life and sees someone who has followed all the rules and met every criterion for success, and yet failed to live.

I was through and through a liar and a hypocrite, but I had manners not likely to be found again soon in this hemisphere; unfortunately these wonderful manners of mine were the only art I had learned.

He was so busy keeping up appearances that he didn't admit or tend to a deep and longstanding depression, the "swallowed tears" that became his cancer, and by his own account never had a lover or even a close friend. But how was his upbringing responsible for this?

I believe I can venture the following definition for the "bourgeois" I have in mind: the "bourgeois" is "quiet at all costs, because otherwise someone else’s peace might be disturbed." And exactly there is the evil. It is bourgeois and it is evil if you object to electrons revolving around the nucleus "because that could possibly disturb someone." It’s to be opposed to the ant crawling through the forest "because the path on which she crawls may be a private road, trespassing subject to a fine." It’s to be against the lion eating the gazelle, "first, because the lion is a foreigner; and second, because the gazelle is not registered with the police; and third, both are still minors." It’s to be against the moon revolving around the earth "because the bright moonlight at night could be perceived as disturbing." It means being opposed to the sun rising, "because the bank has already purchased a majority stake in the sky domain and must wait for the economic situation to improve before the sun can rise." It means that there is always a potential someone to possibly disturb; and if that someone is absolutely not to be found, one must invent him.

I believe that not wanting to disturb is a bad thing precisely because one has to disturb. It is not enough to exist, one must also draw attention to the fact that one exists. It is not enough to just be, one must also act. But he who acts, disturbs - in the noblest meaning of the word.

Ouch. I mean clearly I need to get this tattooed in a conspicuous location, as I'm mortally afraid of disturbing - and I'm not the only one - but the moral of this story is bigger than that. We need stability, safety, and comfort to live; and yet every attempt to keep things neat, tidy, and comfortable is also a suppression of the chaotic primal forces that created us. 

But the whole of life is sexuality; it’s all about loving, desiring, and grappling with the other. The whole process of life can be compared with the act of sexual union: all life constantly strives for mingling, interpenetration, and fusion – and every separation, keeping-apart, splitting-off, and diverging-from is death. Those who come together, live; those who hold themselves apart, die.

Facing his own death, Fritz Zorn poured all of his loving, desiring, and grappling with life into his manuscript - and didn't live. But he gave us the great privilege of accompanying him and witnessing his struggles, and I can only hope that gives him some sort of cosmic comfort. 

Another strong contender on the potential-tattoos list:

…those who do something always make themselves look ridiculous in front of those who do nothing. He who acts always risks showing his weakness; he who does not act risks nothing. One could say that living is always ridiculous, because only death is absolutely not funny.