About the interview with an old actor
I had this dream a while back
The Dream
I was interviewing an actor about a movie at a dinner hosted in his honor. He’s an old man and a few of his friends are also there, they’re also mostly old people, some actors and journalists.
The film itself was directed by Herzog but he’s not there. It was based on a novel by Dostoyevsky. I ask the actor to explain the crux of the film and he’s reluctant perhaps with the thought that it’s useless to summarize such philosophy and beauty in a few sentences. The best books and films have to be seen after all, and can never be described adequately. I remember that I had only asked so that I could then present my point of view which would be undoubtedly more profound. I feel that actors less than directors aren’t given to great philosophy.
I recall that the man carefully starts to talk, but I’m busy formulating my own reply, and lose track of what he’s saying and by the time I realize he’s finished speaking. Now I want to know what he’d said so I can retort appropriately, but he won’t speak again.
However, another person; an old friend of the actor, perhaps another actor himself, tries to paraphrase, “We want to see beauty in the world but its full of ugliness. That creates a contradiction. And that creates the struggle within us.” The old actor nods saying it’s something like that but not quite.
At this point I’m not sure what to do. How could I have been so foolish? Simultaneously I remember thinking that the paraphrased answer was OK, but I can do better. He’s said something interesting but it isn’t entirely correct. I’m still thinking how to formulate my response but I’d also like to know what the old actor had actually said.
At that point an old lady walks in. I recognize her to be a well regarded journalist and apparently she’s known the actor well for a long time. She immediately enquires as to what we’re bothering the actor with: she’s joking of course. Then upon hearing the question and the reply which the other person had given she encourages the man himself to speak up again as she wants to hear it herself. The old actor doesn’t really want to speak again. I remember thinking that he feels tired of these existential conversations. Another person at that time, who had listened perhaps more attentively tells the answer closer to verbatim:
“The money for building the rose garden [the rose garden is perhaps intricate to the plot of the film] is obtained through suffering. The protagonist wants to do good, but he ends up doing something bad. He wants to do bad but he ends up doing something good. The fundamental nature of the world is that it is neither good nor bad. We want to see the world or its components as either good or bad, but they’re not.”
“And to live in this world is neither good nor bad. We try to do good things but they are done in the shadow of bad, and bad things in shadow of good. We think of ourselves as different from the world, but we forget that we’re a part of it. And just like the world we’re neither good nor bad.”
And in between in the dream I’m thinking, they’re right, but there’s something else also. I’m thinking that this world just exists. We struggle against the world and our life consists of this struggle.
His original answer is brilliant and better than what I could have given. I’m left in deep thought. I wake up soon after.
After waking up
I recalled later after waking up that Camus had also talked about the struggle against the world that just exists and doesn’t exist according to how we’d like it. He alikened that to randomness, neither good nor bad. And we as humans would have our reason and our thought trying to progress in the world over time, trying to establish order in this world against disorder, which he termed “absurd”.
He had theorized that we can struggle against this by sticking to our reason/positivity and simply by our will to live, ignore the unreasonable nature of the world. Later in another book, his last: he had abandoned those ideas and said there’s nothing that we can do that’s so good which can overcome the bad things we’ve done. Or nothing we do is so reasonable that it always makes sense.
On another note, the book on which the film was based seemed like my life. There was a protagonist trying to help, or take advantage of a series of messed up women (sometimes it’s hard to tell). There was a little girl also and her nickname was “bullet”, because she was so dangerous.
I don’t exactly remember the plot of the film though.
Thoughts
I’ve been thinking about it for a while anyway. On good and bad as I woke up I thought some of that may relate to recent political events.
A lot of reason and good and bad relates to our decision making. How do we decide what to do? What’s the right thing to do? Good can be something for the greater good (nearly always is). Bad would be selfish.
On happiness and sadness: sometimes we realize that nothing we do matters and the fact that we’re a part of something that seems “bad” or “random”. Random is by definition something whose causes are unknown. That feeling of loss of control is sadness and being in control is happiness. Happiness is when things make sense, sadness is when they don’t.
In any case, what I wanted to ask the protagonist (I think I already knew the answer): isn’t what we do (good or bad), any decisions we make, part of this struggle against the world? In fact, then isn’t that life itself? We therefore, live simply by choosing and to choose is to think (or not to think and decide anyway), therefore, by thinking (or not thinking) we exist. In the dream I was positing our shared struggle as something we do to make sense of everything from within.
In another vein I was thinking that what creativity and this dream is so creative and by that measure a machine that hasn’t lived can never be creative in this sense.
Dostoyevsky never said that, however, that we are neither good nor bad. Maybe he did.
