Breathless and Paralyzed

I sit here, paralyzed at the keyboard. I'm trying to connect the dots of existentialism. But instead of making a leap of faith towards god, or becoming an ubermench, or being nauseated by a tree root, or embracing Marxism as the solution, I'm barely moving.

I watched Jean-Luc Godard's À Bout de Souffle, otherwise known as Breathless, last night. Besides being the usual French tale of love and death sans plot, it was full of dialogue such as:

"I don't know if I'm unhappy because I'm not free, or if I'm not free because I'm unhappy."

"I'm tired. I'm going to die."

"When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other."

Godard's existential dialogue is similar to Ingmar Bergman's work. To my contemporary ear, they sound cliché and pretentious. They've also been widely parodied. Woody Allen's comedy, Love and Death, turns this type of dialogue into a great joke:

Russian gentleman: So who is to say what is moral?
Sonja: Morality is subjective.
Russian gentleman: Subjectivity is objective.
Sonja: Moral notions imply attributes to substances which exist only in relational duality.
Russian gentleman: Not as an essential extension of ontological existence.
Sonja: Can we not talk about sex so much?

I can only appreciate existentialism through art. As brilliant as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre are, their writing doesn't create empathy. Even Sartre's plays are like the dialogue of Breathless: interesting, but not empathetic. But the literary approaches are wonderful, Albert Camus' The Stranger, Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot, and, for me, John Barth's The End of the Road not only illuminate existentialism, but they bring it home to me. Especially the idea of paralysis.

James Joyce talked of Irish paralysis in Dubliners, but he saw it as an Irish response to the repression of religion, England, and provincialism. The existentialists see paralysis as alienation from being authentic. We can't be authentic because we identify ourselves through other people's eyes. When one realizes that everything is subjective according to a group belief and not our own, we become paralyzed by the thought that nothing matters. Nihilsm, really.

I read that Beckett would lie in bed all day. When Jacob Homer, in Barth's End of the Road, sits paralyzed in a train station for a full day, I fully empathized. I feel that paralysis myself, especially working in a corporate environment. This is a go-go world, where the powerful people are nonstop 24/7/365 getting things done. And when those things are done, there are more things to do. For me, pushing paper is hardly an incentive to get out of bed. Homer Simpson solves this dilemma by posting pictures of his daughter at his desk. I don't have children, nor expect any soon. And I'm not sure children can stop existential paralysis. The only thing that can bring action is boredom and sex. Boredom is the lack of interest for a restless mind and sex is a basic drive. So I guess the key to life is boredom and sex. I have to admit, I've never been bored by sex, and I will definitely get out of bed for it. Although it's better in bed.