Death of a Salesman & The Difficulty of Being

'When you bring your body out into this landscape you're bringing it home. Because with all due respect, human bodies were never really made for offices, for streets and corners, and tight places.'

John O Donohue, A Celtic Pilgrimage

For the past few evenings I have been watching Volker Schlondorf's 1985 adaptation of Arthur Miller's great tragedy Death of a Salesman. It illustrates, rather too uncannily, not just my own situation but many sons' situations in the face of ambitious, status-anxious, career-driven fathers. It also illustrates the topsy-turvy nature of western civilization in seeking to validate self-worth and security by external success, status, and approval by the other, whilst holing us up in an office or a car for the best part of our natural born (yet not natural lived) lives.

The performances by Malkovich as the 'prodigal son' returning home after three months on the road, and Dustin Hoffman as the eponymous salesman Willy Loman, are as remarkable as they are heart-breaking. How, in 1984, they could do this 185 times on Broadway (before they committed to a television production the following year) and not have a nervous breakdown, God only knows. It is surely one of the greatest plays of the 20th century to which Hoffman and Malkovich more than do justice.

In one particular scene, in the final act of the play, Biff finally has it out with his father who has hampered him all his life to be something that he isn't, that he doesn't want to become. Biff explains why he stole a fountain pen of the businessman whom his father had convinced him to go see in an effort to get a job.

'I ran down 11 flights of stairs with the pen in my hand, then suddenly I stopped, you hear me? And in the middle of that office building - d'you hear this? - I STOPPED! in the middle of the building and i saw the sky... and I... I... I saw the things that I love in this world, the work and the... the food... and... the time to... to sit and smoke... and I looked at the pen in my hand and said to myself, "What am I grabbing this for? Why am I trying to become what I don't wanna be? What am I doing in an office making a contemptuous begging fool of myself when all that I want is out there waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am" - Now why can't I say that!?'

It takes many years of wandering (mentally-spiritually-physically) to finally realize the easy peace that resides within - the 'I am' that has always been there but which has been covered up in the great tacit conspiracy called 'civilization'. It takes many years to destroy the nonsense of 'failure' and 'success' and 'ambition'. Indeed, if we looked at the etymology of the word 'fail' (to deceive, trick, elude) it might reveal the paradox at its core: that the true failures of this world are the 'successful' manipulators who seek to seduce us into being 'successful'. Whilst looking at my own native tongue, Irish Gaelic, I can see that the word 'success' simply does not exist. Not because we Celts were good for nothing layabouts (not such a bad thing) but because we knew that success was a mutually arising process, that it was not some thing which was conferred upon you. In Irish, there is the colloquial phrase d'eirigh liom literally '[It] arose with me', and a common greeting Go n-eiri an bothar leat meaning 'May your path arise with you' i.e 'Be successful'. The etymology of the word 'ambition' elucidates similarly: from Latin ambitio, a going around (esp. to solicit votes, hence a 'striving for favour, courting, flattery'); a desire for honour, a thirst for popularity. In earlier usage, ambition was always grouped with overreaching desire, pride and vainglory.

'...it is ambition enough', writes John Locke in his epistle to the reader of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 'to be employed as an under-labourer in cleansing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge'.

Like ambition and success, 'security' and 'self-worth' are accursed concepts dreamt up by those who have sold their souls to the highest bidder and would have us do likewise. Security (and its pernicious offshoots) does not exist in nature. Nor for that matter does self-worth (which is increasingly paraded as self-serving narcissism when it isn't an outright pathology). When was the last time you saw a magpie take out life insurance, or a swan spend three hours in front of a mirror? Sure, they take care of themselves, and avoid any dodgy situations, but rely on others to do it for them?

The irony in Willy Loman's father figure reflects the Zen precept of 'the watched pot never boils' (played out amusingly enough by Loman's undemanding neighbour and his super-successful son). 'Being' cannot be forced but has to arise spontaneously 'of its own accord', naturally, because it wants to. Not because someone says so. Least of all because society demands it. Biff finally achieves liberation (through the death of the salesman that his father had concocted inside him) while running down the stairs with the equally liberated fountain pen in his hand, having come more or less to the end of his tether. It is not unusual for one to awake on the edge of the tether, but what is unusual is to stay remaining at the edge, to leap off into the unknown, and not to immediately step back and fall straight back into slumber.

This is the difficulty of being - to persist courageously in remaining awake, to make that leap of faith (as much as to have faith in the leap itself), especially when all the signs around you, all those successes (and seductresses) are begging you to join them. Have faith in your own mysterious centre, that exists without security, without ambition, and without self-worth. Success, then, will arise within you, become you, without your even knowing it.

How strange to think of giving up all ambition!
Suddenly I see with such clear eyes
The white flake of snow
That has just fallen on the horse's mane.

Robert Bly (Watering the Horse)