Blog
13.February 2003 - 00:00
An Obsession for a happy ending
A few days ago I had a conversation with Jouko Turkka, a well-known Finnish theatre director, who began to criticise one of my columns. "Didn't like it", he blurted out in his familiar blunt fashion. "You ought to disturb people, not pacify them and just provoke sighs of contentment."
Turkka hates journalism. It worked against humanity and was on par with criminality. It was journalists just exchanging their fantasies, regardless of human sensitivities. It had broken any link with reality and had also prevented us from seeing the bigger picture. It had created a disconnected world where the one enjoying his fish hors d’oeuvre didn't see the consequences of what floated in the Gulf of Finland. And almost without exception the structure of the columnists’ writing inevitably led them to look backwards. And so they gave a too serene and secure picture of the world. "You must look at the raw world,” Turkka said. ”You must show the context."
Of course I protested that few journalists could imagine themselves being able to shake the spiritual continental shelf like the writer of The Shame, and neither could he expect from others what he demanded of himself. Yet I took the point and admitted there was perhaps an obsession or a habitual looking for a happy ending. It slips unperceived into our discussions and writing. This was not the first time that someone has made this point.
I have a world-view of which I'm not in the least ashamed. It has rescued me from despair. Part of it is a trust that the fundamental truth about our existence is goodness and that behind all its seeming contradictions is love. I admit it’s a luxury among worldviews to dare to think like this. It certainly puts everything I have experienced into a different light, both my personal tragedies as well as the world’s absurdities I meet. It just happens to be so; there is nothing to brag about. Rather, I feel myself badly indebted to the object of my faith.
But is this what cloys when I try to open my mouth? Why does it always happen in my stories, this serene ending? Is a typical by-product of faith a habitual mangling of everything that comes under my scrutiny? And it’s not even a question of whether the subject is religious or not. Whatever I may talk about, I am in danger of repeating the same familiar structure I first met in the Good Shepherd stories of my childhood.
The late playwright Dennis Potter must have meant something like this in his last TV interview. While admitting having many ties to the Christian inheritance and to childhood songs about God, at the same time he wanted to wriggle out of it and to distance himself from any religious culture. What bothered him in that culture was its extraordinary conventionality and complacency. It was as if a medication was offered before the wound was even perceived; the end result being a desensitising. And he wanted to view it differently. ”Faith to me is a wound, not a medicine.”
This is how the French philosopher-writer Simone Weil also saw it. In her work Gravity and Grace she differentiates between two kinds of atheism, one of which she says means cleansing the concept of God. ”Faith as a means of comfort is an obstacle to real faith: in that sense atheism means cleansing. I have to be an atheist with that part of my being which has not been created for God.” I understand that she speaks of religion that has become an all-too-useful commodity. Presumably she was bothered about religion being turned into a product: its use made clear; explaining its content done to death. ”He who builds his life on his faith in God may lose his faith. But he who builds his life on God himself will never lose it. We have to build our life on a foundation that cannot be touched. It is impossible. It is death. This is what we have to do.”
Dare one, then, speak any longer about the comfort of faith? But one does begin to seek it with a sort of vague longing for comfort welling up in the mind.
I know not. That which is securely true I cannot deny; for then I would deny even myself. But with Potter and Weil in mind I carefully try not to confuse the goal and the consequences. We are in an area where nothing happens automatically but everything can happen all of a sudden. It’s an area both fascinating and frightening.
Forgive me if this was too happy an ending.
A few days ago I had a conversation with Jouko Turkka, a well-known Finnish theatre director, who began to criticise one of my columns. "Didn't like it", he blurted out in his familiar blunt fashion. "You ought to disturb people, not pacify them and just provoke sighs of contentment."
Turkka hates journalism. It worked against humanity and was on par with criminality. It was journalists just exchanging their fantasies, regardless of human sensitivities. It had broken any link with reality and had also prevented us from seeing the bigger picture. It had created a disconnected world where the one enjoying his fish hors d’oeuvre didn't see the consequences of what floated in the Gulf of Finland. And almost without exception the structure of the columnists’ writing inevitably led them to look backwards. And so they gave a too serene and secure picture of the world. "You must look at the raw world,” Turkka said. ”You must show the context."
Of course I protested that few journalists could imagine themselves being able to shake the spiritual continental shelf like the writer of The Shame, and neither could he expect from others what he demanded of himself. Yet I took the point and admitted there was perhaps an obsession or a habitual looking for a happy ending. It slips unperceived into our discussions and writing. This was not the first time that someone has made this point.
I have a world-view of which I'm not in the least ashamed. It has rescued me from despair. Part of it is a trust that the fundamental truth about our existence is goodness and that behind all its seeming contradictions is love. I admit it’s a luxury among worldviews to dare to think like this. It certainly puts everything I have experienced into a different light, both my personal tragedies as well as the world’s absurdities I meet. It just happens to be so; there is nothing to brag about. Rather, I feel myself badly indebted to the object of my faith.
But is this what cloys when I try to open my mouth? Why does it always happen in my stories, this serene ending? Is a typical by-product of faith a habitual mangling of everything that comes under my scrutiny? And it’s not even a question of whether the subject is religious or not. Whatever I may talk about, I am in danger of repeating the same familiar structure I first met in the Good Shepherd stories of my childhood.
The late playwright Dennis Potter must have meant something like this in his last TV interview. While admitting having many ties to the Christian inheritance and to childhood songs about God, at the same time he wanted to wriggle out of it and to distance himself from any religious culture. What bothered him in that culture was its extraordinary conventionality and complacency. It was as if a medication was offered before the wound was even perceived; the end result being a desensitising. And he wanted to view it differently. ”Faith to me is a wound, not a medicine.”
This is how the French philosopher-writer Simone Weil also saw it. In her work Gravity and Grace she differentiates between two kinds of atheism, one of which she says means cleansing the concept of God. ”Faith as a means of comfort is an obstacle to real faith: in that sense atheism means cleansing. I have to be an atheist with that part of my being which has not been created for God.” I understand that she speaks of religion that has become an all-too-useful commodity. Presumably she was bothered about religion being turned into a product: its use made clear; explaining its content done to death. ”He who builds his life on his faith in God may lose his faith. But he who builds his life on God himself will never lose it. We have to build our life on a foundation that cannot be touched. It is impossible. It is death. This is what we have to do.”
Dare one, then, speak any longer about the comfort of faith? But one does begin to seek it with a sort of vague longing for comfort welling up in the mind.
I know not. That which is securely true I cannot deny; for then I would deny even myself. But with Potter and Weil in mind I carefully try not to confuse the goal and the consequences. We are in an area where nothing happens automatically but everything can happen all of a sudden. It’s an area both fascinating and frightening.
Forgive me if this was too happy an ending.