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waking_essay_orig.htm
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<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1251">
<title></title>
</head>
<body alink="#ff0000" bgcolor="#ffffff" link="#0000ff" text="#000000" vlink="#551a8b">
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0" align="CENTER">
<span style="font-family: Tahoma"><strong>
<font size="5">Buddhists, Existentialists and Situationists: Waking up in </font><em>
<font size="5">Waking Life</font></em></strong></span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0" align="CENTER"> </p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0" align="CENTER">
<span style="font-family: Tahoma"><strong>by Doug Mann</strong></span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0" align="CENTER"> </p>
<p><span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium"><strong><font size="4">
<img src="waking_essay_files/waking%2520life%2520wiley%2520floats.jpg" align="left" border="0" height="248" hspace="10" width="410">1. Introduction: What if Life Were Just a Dream?</font></strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Richard Linklater's 2002 film <em>Waking Life </em>is
all about dreaming, and how we can sometimes
lucidly control our dreams.
Yet it's also about some broad philosophical issues, including one of
the oldest philosophical conundrums, the distinction between
appearance and reality. When René Descartes sat at his stove and
meditated on the world and on whether an evil demon controlled
everything he perceived, he wondered, what's more real, dreams or waking
life? The diverse collection of characters in Linklater's
film ask the same question. Yet they ask it not just in a literal sense,
but also as a metaphor for the nature of modern culture and for
the human condition as a whole - in what ways do we fall asleep even
while awake? How can we lead a life that is <em>more </em>awake, more
aware of people and things, more authentic? The film provides the outlines of three wake-up calls to three more-or-less separate
ways in which we sleep too easily.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">This issue is not
new. It goes all the way back to Plato's Allegory of the Cave: what if
you were chained in a dimly-lit cave your whole
life where you saw only the shadows of real things passing by the
entrance to your cave reflected on its back wall? Suddenly you're
free and come into the sunlight. Would you recognize this new world as
more real than your cave
world? And would you be able to
convince those still enchained in the cave that there was a greater
world outside their dwelling? Would you be able, in Plato's terms,
to wake up to reality?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">This whole idea of
"waking up" is a key idea in a number of philosophies explored in the
film. In ancient Eastern philosophy - the
Indian Vedanta philosophy of the Upanishads, Taoism, and Buddhism - the
key to waking up is Enlightenment and a correct
understanding of the relation of the self to the external world. In
existentialism, we have to wake up to our personal freedom and our
responsibility for creating our own selves and lives. And in the
situationism of Guy Debord and others, we have to wake up from the
sugar-coated spell of consumer society.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">
<img src="waking_essay_files/richardlinklater.jpg" align="right" border="0" height="180" hspace="6" vspace="2" width="225">The
film was made first by filming live action with a digital video camera,
then transferring the video to computers, and rotoscoping
(colouring over) the images to turn them into animation. Thirty
different artists were involved in the process, all with different
styles.
Rotoscoping has been used before - as early as Disney's 1937 <em>Snow White, </em>and several decades later in Ralph Bakshi's <em>The Lord of the
Rings </em>and <em>American Pop. </em>It gives a flowing, surreal,
dreamlike quality to much of the film, surely Linklater's intention. And
although the
film is divided into 34 more or less distinct shorts, they're linked
together by the constant presence of the "dreamer," Wiley Wiggins,
who also acted in Linklater's <em>Dazed and Confused</em>. In addition, the shorts are linked by most of them taking place in Linklater's home
town of Austin, Texas, and by thematic links between the ideas presented in adjacent scenes.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">To understand the
structure of the film and to keep track of what's happening in each of
its scenes, I've named and outlined each
scene in the following chart. Each scene has been titled (using those
provided by the DVD track list where feasible), briefly
described, and situated in terms of the main philosophical ideas found
in them. I've also indicated which ones I consider to be axial
scenes when it comes to a philosophical understanding of the film along
the lines set out in this essay.</span></p>
<table border="1" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1" height="0%" width="100%">
<tbody><tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium; font-weight:700">Scene in Film</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium; font-weight:700">What It's About</span></td>
<td><span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium; font-weight:700">Philosophical Themes</span></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">1. Dream is Destiny</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Wiley Wiggins dreams of playing with origami
fortune teller ("dream is destiny"), then floats away,
touching a car handle. </span></td>
<td><span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Dreaming vs. Reality</span></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">2. Anchors Aweigh (The Boatisattva)</span><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">
</font>
<p><span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">AXIAL SCENE</span></p></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Bill Wise picks up Wiley in his boat car, telling him
to go with the flow. He's in a state of constant
departure. Random choices are important. Linklater is
with them.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Buddhism</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Taoism</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">3. Condemned to be Free</span><p></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">AXIAL SCENE</span></p></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Philosopher Robert C. Solomon defends
existentialism against the socially constructed,
fragmented self of postmodernism: "it's your life to
create."</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Existentialism (especially Sartre on freedom)</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">4. Signifier and Signified</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Kim Krizan tells Wiley that words are inert, dead
symbols. At first they were survival tactics. They try
to help us transcend our isolation, allow for spiritual
communion.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Vedanta</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Situationism</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">5. Neohuman Evolution</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Eamonn Healy, a chemistry professor, predicts the
evolution of a neohuman manifesting truth, loyalty,
justice, freedom.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"> </p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195"><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">
</font>
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">6. Self-Immolation</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Journalist J. C. Shakespeare rants about human self-destruction & the media making us passive
observers; he sets fire to himself like the Vietnamese
Buddhist monk in 1963.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Situationism </span>
</p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"></p>
</td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">7. Collective Memory</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke muse in bed about
dreaming and multiple consciousnesses, death,
collective memory, and the simultaneity of scientific
discoveries.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Taoism</span><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">
</font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Tibetan Buddhism</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Dreaming</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">8. The Prisoner</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Prisoner swears revenge against his captors. He's
trapped in his self-created hell, like Sartre's
characters in <em>No Exit.</em></span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">[Existentialism]</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">9. Free Will and Physics</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">David Sosa, physics professor, discusses free will in
Augustine & Aquinas, and how it's compromised by
modern physics.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Existentialism</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">10. Systems of Control</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Alex Jones, radical broadcaster, rants over a
loudspeaker about how political systems of control
turn us into slaves.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Situationism</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">11. Say Yes to Existence</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Otto Hoffman, a Quaker, wants us to be free from
nothingness, to say Yes to one instant, and thus to
all existence.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Buddhism</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Existentialism (Nietzsche's love of fate)</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">12. Liminal Experiences</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Aklilu Gebrewold, African-American writer, speaks
of liminal experiences, radical subjectivity, and the
great moment.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Vedanta</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Situationism</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">13. The Aging Paradox</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Carol Dawson, novelist, and Lisa Moore, English
professor, speak of feeling freer as they age and of the
fiction of personal identity. </span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Buddhism</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">14. Noise and Silence</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">A chimp speaks of subversive micro-societies and
the possibilities of art while screening a rock
performance and a showing of Kurosawa's film
<em>Dreams.</em></span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Situationism</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">15. The Overman</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Louis Mackey, a philosophy professor, laments
people's fear and laziness, their inability to reach
their true potentials.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Existentialism (Nietzsche on the Overman)</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">16. What's the Story?</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Violet Nichols asks Alex Nixon what's the story he's
writing; it's just gestures, moments, fleeting
emotions, he says.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">[Postmodernism]</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">17. The Right to Bear Arms</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Steven Prince tells a bartender how he treasures his
right to bear arms. He shoots the barkeep, who
shoots him in return.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"> </p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195"><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">
</font>
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">18. Lucid Dreams</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Clips on television: a man talks of flawed reality of
the present; Mary McBay of lucid dream state
reached by sorcerers, shamans; man talks of
narrowness of the single ego.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Dreaming</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">[Buddhism]</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">19. Dreamers Muse</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Three men: Jason Hodge identifies waking &
dreaming perceptions; Guy Forsyth wants to
combine waking & dreaming abilities; John
Christensen says "fun rules."</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Dreaming</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">20. The Holy Moment</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Caveh Zahedi talks about film allowing us to see
holy moments (Andre Bazin saw God as reality, film
as presenting God). He and David Jewell have such
a moment.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Bazin</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">[Vedanta]</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">[Situationism]</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">21. Society is a Fraud</span><p></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">AXIAL SCENE</span></p></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Adam Goldberg, Nicky Katt, two others want to
rupture the spell of the consumer society, interrupt
continuum of everyday life. "Mr. Debord" discusses
not working.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Situationism</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">22. The Train Arrives</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">A man pops out of a train car, tells Wiley he's a
dreamer, and that it's the most exciting time to be
alive: don't be bored.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Buddhism</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Dreaming</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">23. One Thousand Years</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Ryan Power, an autistic kid, tells Wiley that 1000
years is but an instant, to build beautiful artifacts,
feel joy, sorrow, etc.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Vedanta</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Taoism</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">[Situationism]</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">24. The Human Ant Colony </span><p></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">AXIAL SCENE</span></p></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Tiana Hux, performance artist, compels Wiley to
communicate with her, rejecting the "ant" autopilot
most of us use everyday. In lucid dreams we're in
control.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Situationism</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Dreaming</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Buddhism</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">25. The Ongoing Wow</span><p></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">AXIAL SCENE</span></p></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Mad poet/tour guide Timothy "Speed" Levitch
speaks of the ongoing wow, Lorca's poems, that
we're the authors of our lives, that life understood
is life lived.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Existentialism</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Situationism</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Buddhism</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">26. Dream Self</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Short scene: Steve Brudniak, artist, says
the person you
are in a dream isn't your real self - you haven't yet
met yourself.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Dreaming</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">27. Channel Surfing</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">TV: Catholic puppet speaks of heaven & hell; Steven
Soderbergh tells joke about Billy Wilder and Louis
Malle; Mary McBay discusses post-death dream
body.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Dreaming</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">28. Swept Along</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Short scene: man on street says that as pattern gets
more intricate, being swept along is no longer
enough.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"> </p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195"><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">
</font>
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">29. Exploding Burritos</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Bill Wise returns as convenience store clerk (denies
other role) bemoaning customer who explodes
burritos in his microwave.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"> </p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195"><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">
</font>
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">30. Every Moment is Magical</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Mona Lee, actress, sees the self as a logical
structure. Life was raging all around her, and every
moment was magical.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Buddhism</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">31. Garden and Portrait</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Short scene: an elderly woman draws Wiley's
portrait in a garden.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Taoism</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">32. Sweep Me Up</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Short scene. Passing man: "Kierkegaard's last words
were, 'Sweep me up'".</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Existentialism</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">33. The Tango of Yes</span><p></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">AXIAL SCENE</span></p></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Orchestra from earlier in film plays a tango, dancers
dance. Linklater plays pinball, tells Wiley about
Philip K. Dick story coming true in his life, dream of
Lady Gregory: there's only one instant, it's right
now. God invites us into eternity. There's only one
story: moving from the No to the Yes.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Dreaming</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Vedanta</span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">[Existentialism (Nietzsche)]</span></p></td></tr>
<tr valign="TOP"><td width="195">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">34. Wake Up!</span></td>
<td width="546">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Wiley wakes up, walks down street on beautiful
day, begins to float again.</span></td>
<td>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Dreaming, Vedanta, Taoism</span></p></td></tr></tbody></table>
<p><span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">As I've said, the
central issue in the film is dreaming. The idea of lucid dreaming, of
knowing that you're dreaming and thus being able
to exert some control over your dreams, has been explored by dream
researcher Stephen Laberge of the Lucidity Institute, whose
ideas are alluded to in the film. The first scene of the film, Dream is
Destiny, features Wiley as a child playing with a young girl outside
a house. They're making an origami fortune teller, which when they open
it up tells them "dream is destiny." Wiley then walks over
to a car, grabs its handle, and starts to float away. We return to this
locale
in the very last scene in the film, when Wiley floats
away once again. We get the sense from the way the film is framed by
these two scenes that in the dream world time is an illusion - Wiley's
present and past mix together fairly seamlessly. More obviously, we
realize from these scenes that the whole film is a lucid dream,
one which Wiley can control only in part.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">
<img src="waking_essay_files/tianahux.jpg" align="left" border="0" height="237" hspace="12" width="189">In
Scene 24, The Human Ant Colony, Wiley is stopped by performance artist
Tiana Hux, who engages him in a fairly long
conversation on a variety of subjects (I'll return to this important
scene a couple of more times). Notably, the animator has given the
scene the look of a Picasso or Matisse painting - the characters have
oversized eyes as in <em>Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon;</em> the background
is
primitivist and abstract. Wiley asks her directly, what's it like to be a
character in a dream? She avoids answering the question, but
does tell him that given the fact that he's dreaming, he can do whatever
he wants. "You have so many options, and that's what life is
about," she says. So from discovering the fact that Wiley is dreaming,
Linklater brings up the question of human freedom, and
indirectly that of authenticity. "It's up to you to choose what you want
to do with your life," he in effect says, "so don't wait around
for others to make your choices for you." </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">We get further
evidence of the power of the dream state in Scene 19, Dreamers Muse,
where Wiley visits three men in a white
room. The first one, Jason Hodge, explains to Wiley that our brain
chemistry inhibited hallucinations early in our evolutionary
development so that we didn't confuse images of predators with real
ones. But in dreams this inhibition is lifted, and we're free to
have "hallucinations," which from point of view of brain chemistry are
no more or less real than our waking perceptions. This
becomes important when the second man in the white room, Guy Forsyth,
explains that "the trick is to combine your waking,
rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams,
because if you can do that, you can do anything." Once again, dreaming
in related to freedom and creativity. But this time, there's an
evolutionary imperative mixed in to explain the limitations of waking
life
as compared to the freedom of the dream world - to survive, we had to
learn to distinguish the dream from the waking worlds.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">The actual idea of
lucid dreaming is briefly mentioned by an elderly lady seen on a
television show Wiley watches briefly in Scene 18,
Lucid Dreams. She links lucid dreaming to a "venerable tradition of
sorcerers, shamans, and other visionaries," who were able to
control their dreams. Scene 27, Channel Surfing, finds Wiley back in
front of his television. The woman reappears, suggesting that
perhaps after we die our consciousness continues in a dream body, never
again waking. This suggestion is followed up in key Scene
33, The Tango of Yes, where Linklater plays pinball as he talks to
Wiley. He reveals a dream he himself had of Lady Gregory,
W. B. Yeats'
patron, in the Land of the Dead. In the dream he learns that God poses a
question to all of us when we dream: do we want to join
him in eternity, or return to waking life? We live our lives constantly
saying "no" to God's question, until we eventually say "yes," and
shuffle off the mortal coil. Yet it's important to note that Linklater
is eager to leave the putrid-smelling Land of the Dead, to say no to
eternity at least this time, to return to waking life. He also tells
Wiley that it's easy to wake up, waving his hands over his eyes in a
sort
of sorcerer's spell. Yet Wiley winds up waking into just another level
of his lucid dream, ending the movie.</span></p>
<hr>
<p><span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium"><strong><font size="4">
<img src="waking_essay_files/groovy%2520buddha.jpg" align="right" border="0" height="246" hspace="10" width="173">2. First Wake-Up Call: Vedanta, Taoism, Buddhism and the Reality of the Now</font></strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Franklin Gothic Medium">Our first wake up
call is that from attachment to the past, to the ego as an individual
and unconnected entity, and to material things
over the spiritual unity of the universe. This call awakens us to our
connection to everything around us, and to a meaningful life.<a href="#N_1_"><sup> (1)</sup></a></span></p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">The first of three themes taken
from Eastern philosophy has to with Vedanta, by which I mean ancient
Indian thought first presented
in the Upanishads and later systematized by thinkers like Shankara.<a href="#N_2_"><sup> (2)</sup></a>
The Vedantists argued that Atman is Brahman, and Brahman is
Atman - the soul is the universe, and the universe is contained in every
soul. There is only one reality, which we can call God if we
like, and which is represented by Aum, the sacred syllable. They also
believed that bad karma can trap us in the senses and the
physical body, and that we must seek release from a narrow view of the
self as physical and individual, to enlighten our consciousness
to our connection to all things.</font></p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">The Upanishads argue that there
is a higher self that watches over the more mundane self caught up in
the world of the senses and
the cycle of rebirth. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad puts it this way:</font></p>
<blockquote>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">It is said of these states of
consciousness that in the dreaming state, where one is sleeping, the
shining Self, who never dreams, who is
ever awake, watches by his own light the dreams woven out of past deeds
and present desires. In the dream state, when one is
sleeping, the shining Self keeps the body alive with the vital force of
prana, and wanders wherever he wills. (Easwaran 44-45).</font></p>
</blockquote>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">More systematically, the ancient
writers of the Upanishads argued that there are in fact four levels of
consciousness, and that the
dream state is <em>higher </em>than that experienced in waking life
(though there are two higher states still). The Mandukya Upanishad
(Easwaran 60-61) argues that these four levels of consciousness are (1)
our waking awareness of the external world, (2) the dream
state, (3) a dreamless sleep, and (4) a superconscious state where we
use neither our senses nor our intellect. This fourth state,
<em>Turiya </em>in Sanskrit, is where we are one with Brahman. It is the shining self referred to above.</font></p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">Shankara argued that Brahman is
the one absolute reality which underlies all external appearances.
Further, he noted that just as
dream objects seem unreal only when we wake up and experience them with
our waking consciousness, when we wake up to the
higher reality of Brahman, we see ordinary sense experience as a sort of
dream. Only Brahman is real. We might see a rope at a
distance and think it's a snake, but when we view it close up, we
realize our ignorance. Our belief in the ultimate reality of normal
waking life is a similar sort of ignorance (Kollers 77). </font> </p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">We see these ideas in several
scenes. Most fundamentally, Wiley's dream self "wanders wherever he
wills," to quote the Upanishads.
He floats in and out of new situations, meeting a wide variety of people
in his dream wanderings. We also get a clear sense of how
ordinary consciousness puts off communion with the whole - our Atman is
under normal conditions unaware of Brahman. In Scene 4,
Signifier and Signified, Kim Krizan (co-screenwriter of Linklater's
earlier film <em>After Sunrise) </em>argues that words were designed to
transcend our alienation from each other, but are in reality dead and
inert symbols. Yet if we can use them to truly communicate, to
achieve spiritual communion, we can free our consciousness. She says
that this sense of spiritual communion is what we live for. This
could well be the Vedanta notion of <em>Turiya, </em>the highest state of consciousness.</font></p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">Hints of unity with Brahman
appear in several other places in the film. In Scene 12, Liminal
Experiences, Aklilu Gebrewold speaks of
liminal experiences becoming more frequent, and of a radical
subjectivity opening itself to a vast objectivity, a moment which
contains
the whole universe, a very Vedantist turn of phrase. In Scene 23, One
Thousand Years, Ryan Power, an autistic 13-year old, says that
1000 years is but an instant, implying that time is unreal seen from
some higher perspective. And Scene 20, The Holy Moment,
although ostensibly about André Bazin's theory of the cinema, echoes
Vedantist ideas: when the camera captures a moment of reality,
it is capturing God, since God is in all things. If Shankara were a film
director, this is surely something he would have understood.</font></p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">
<img src="waking_essay_files/rock%2520garden%2520animated.gif" align="left" border="0" height="165" hspace="8" width="182">To
clinch the connection, in Scene 33, The Tango of Yes, Linklater himself
says that in his dream of Lady Gregory she told him that
"there's only one instant, and it's right now, and it's eternity": in
other words, Atman is Brahman. And there's only one story - do you
say No or Yes to God's invitation to enter eternity? Here is yet more
evidence for the presence of the Vedantist idea of cosmic
monism in the film.</font></p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">Our second Eastern philosophy,
Taoism, is powered by its belief in the Tao, or the Way, which is
natural, spontaneous, and balanced.
It is a mysterious universal force underlying all of nature which cannot
be precisely named. Lao Tzu starts the <em>Tao Te Ching </em>with an
attempt at describing it:</font></p>
<blockquote>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.</font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">The name that can be named is not the eternal name.</font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">The nameless is the beginning of heaven and Earth</font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.</font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
</font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">Ever desiring, one sees the manifestations.</font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">These two spring from the same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness.</font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">Darkness within darkness.</font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">The gate to all mystery. (<em>Tao Te Ching
</em>1, Feng translation)</font></p>
</blockquote>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">Water is an important Taoist metaphor: though soft, it can wear down the hardest rock. The metaphor of water wearing down rock
is part of the general Taoist idea that suppleness and not striving can overcome strength over time:</font></p>
<blockquote>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">Under heaven nothing is more soft and yielding than water,</font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">Yet for attacking the solid and strong, nothing is better;</font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">It has no equal. (<em>Tao Te Ching </em>78)
</font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">The softest thing in the universe</font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">Overcomes the hardest thing in the universe.
<em>(Tao Te Ching </em>43)</font></p>
</blockquote>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">Taoists advocate <em>wu wei, </em>which is literally "non-action," but means more generally spontaneous or natural action. Following this
principle allows us to live in peace with nature and to find tranquillity.</font></p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">The Taoists see the universe as held together by <em>ch'i,</em>
breath or Life Energy. It is in constant flux, balanced by the Tao. The
self has no
fixed identity - as in Buddhism, it's constantly changing, constantly
flowing. We should live in the moment, and not be overcome by
our desires. Too much attachment breeds unhappiness:</font></p>
<blockquote>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">He who is attached to things will suffer much.</font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">He who saves will suffer heavy loss.</font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">A contented man is never disappointed. (<em>Tao Te Ching
</em>44)</font></p>
</blockquote>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">Also connected with Taoism is the <em>I Ching, </em>or Book of Changes, which contains a method of divining the future, and the idea that the
universe is balanced between Yin and Yang, the female and male principles.</font></p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">We see Taoism in several places in <em>Waking Life. </em>Scene
2, Anchors Aweigh, the
"Boatisattva" Bill Wise advises Wiley to "go with the
flow," a Taoist metaphor rendered into modern language. In fact, the
whole oddness of the image of a boat driving down a city street
reinforces the watery nature of the start of Wiley's journey. The scene
also evokes the <em>I Ching </em>when Bill Wise tells Wiley that even if
he makes a random choice as to his destination, it will determine his
fate. Wiley's choice isn't too natural, for after he debarks from
the boat car he gets run over and wakes into another dream.</font></p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">
<img src="waking_essay_files/juliedelpyethanhawke.jpg" align="right" border="0" height="300" hspace="8" width="375">Scene
7, Collective Memory, finds Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in bed. Delpy
says that she sometimes thinks she's observing her life
from the perspective of an old woman, looking back on her life. Hawke
muses that a second of dream consciousness could be
equivalent to whole minutes of waking life. These musings hint at the
Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu's paradoxes concerning
appearance and reality and his notion that perspective is always
relative - the way something appears to <em>you </em>might be quite different
from the way it appears to <em>me. </em>He illustrated this idea with a
story: he once woke up from a dream of being a butterfly, but couldn't
decide whether he was a man who dreamed he was a butterfly, or a
butterfly dreaming he was a man. Similarly, this scene poses the
riddle: is Delpy the old woman dreaming of her lost youth, or the young
woman dreaming of some future state?</font></p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">Scene 31, Garden and Portrait, is
a wordless one where see a small waterfall flowing over rocks emptying
into a peaceful pool of
water. In the pool we see goldfish. A cat prowls around its edge. In
this very harmonious Taoist garden an old woman is drawing
portraits, showing Wiley a sketch she's done of him at the end. This
brief scene is doubly Taoist: it pictures natural harmony, and does
so without naming it, without words.</font></p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">The main Eastern influence on <em>Waking Life </em>is
Buddhism. The Buddha was the Awakened One. He believed that all life
was suffering,
but this could be limited by limiting our cravings or desires. We suffer
because we are too attached to the past, the future, others,
material things, and our selves as unchanging entities. Buddhism asks us
to wake up from our false belief in and attachment to the
permanence of things, including the permanence of the individual ego,
and to embrace the reality of the now.</font></p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">A key Buddhist concept is <em>interdependent arising, </em>sometime referred to as dependent origination. It means simply that everything is
connected. One of the reasons we experience <em>dukkha, </em>or
suffering, is our refusal to see the interconnected and ever-changing
nature
of things. The self is always in flux. Nothing is permanent: it is
empty, sunyata, to borrow Nagarjuna's term. Enlightenment, nirvana,
can only come once we let go of our attachment to the permanence of the
self, at least the self as a fixed entity. One way to do this is
by practising mindfulness, by being aware of the reality all around us.
This is especially important because our karma is always ebbing
and flowing, so being mindful of the effects of our actions on others is
especially important for the Buddhist. Mahayana Buddhism later
introduced the idea of a Bodhisattva, or spiritual guide, to help us
reach enlightenment. The Bodhisattva
compassionately puts off nirvana so he or she can remain in the world of
the senses and help others.</font></p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium"><em>
<img src="waking_essay_files/bodi%2520tree.jpg" align="left" border="0" height="238" hspace="10" width="277">Waking Life</em>
starts with a Bodhisattva helping Wiley on his way. In Scene 2, Anchors
Aweigh, Bill Wise appears in his boat car to act as
Wiley's "boatisattva", his spiritual guide at the start of his lucid
dream. Interestingly, Linklater himself is also in the car. Wise is in a
state of constant departure, always in flux, always ready to ship out.
Naturally, the idea of being in a state of constant departure<em> is</em> the
Buddhist notion of the self: never fixed, always in flux. </font> </p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">In Scene 11, Say Yes to
Existence, Otto Hoffman, a Quaker, asks us to liberate ourselves from
the negative and to say Yes to one
instant, and thus to all existence. In other words, we should live in
the now and not be attached to the past or possible futures. This
point is reinforced in Scene 22, The Train Arrives, when David Martinez
debarks from a train and tells Wiley not to be bored because
"this is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped
to be alive." The reality of the now comes up a third time in
Scene 25, The Ongoing Wow, where Timothy "Speed" Levitch, a wild and
wacky New York poet and tour guide, tells Wiley that the
"ongoing WOW is happening right now," and that life understood is life
lived. This scene is rotoscoped with psychedelic colours and
patterns, stars floating in the air, and an exploding hairdo on Levitch
that reminds one of a 1960s Bob Dylan poster. It's an important
scene because all three of our major themes - Buddhism, existentialism
and situationism - are mixed together in Levitch's mad rant.
Be that as it may, we get repeated reminders from Linklater's characters
of the need to be aware of the reality of present instant, the
ongoing wow of the now, a central tenet of Buddhism.</font></p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">Throughout the film Wiley is
asked to pay attention, to be mindful, of the swirl of experience going
on around him. This is perhaps
indicated by the appearance of a beautiful young woman in the bus
station at the beginning of Scene 2, then again in Scene 26, when
she asks if he remembers her (he says he doesn't). Her kind face is a
reminder to Wiley to focus his compassion on his immediate
world, and not on distant people and things.</font></p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">Scene 24, The Human Ant Colony,
follows up on this theme. Tiana Hux confronts Wiley with the need to be
awake to the reality of
all encounters, to practise mindfulness. She tells him that she doesn't
want to wander around on "ant autopilot" all the time, but
wants instead some real human moments. Wiley confesses that he has been
on zombie autopilot a lot lately, recounting the D. H.
Lawrence story of two people meeting on a road and deciding to "accept
what he calls the confrontation between their souls." So the
reality of the ongoing wow requires this sort of confrontation, a
mindfulness of the existence of the other.</font></p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">In Scene 13, The Aging Paradox,
two women - Carol Dawson, a novelist, and Lisa Moore, an English
professor - discuss the aging
paradox. As they get older, they feel they have more time, not being
attached to the rigid goals of their youth. As young women they
felt an eager desperation to reach a plateau in their lives somewhere in
their thirties. Yet when they got there, this desperation
evaporated, and they felt a greater freedom. They also discuss how we
have to use things like old photos to construct an identity
which links our present to our past selves, even though this identity is
essentially a fiction. In fact, our cells regenerate every seven
years, so we shed off the skin of several selves in the course of a
lifetime. Moore and Dawson have seemingly thrown off their
attachments to an illusory future and to the fixed nature of their
selves.
</font> </p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">We see further Buddhist themes in
Scene 30, when Mona Lee says our self is just a logical structure, a
"place to momentarily house all
the abstractions," and that in times past life was raging all around
her, and "every moment was magical." Lastly, Scene 7 makes a brief
allusion to the ideas of reincarnation and collective memory found in
Tibetan Buddhism. Julie Delpy dismisses reincarnation as a real
metaphysical possibility due to the fact that with so many "new" people
in the world over the last forty years, it's difficult to figure out
where all these new souls came from. However, she sees reincarnation as a
poetic expression of something that is more substantial,
collective memory. Ethan Hawke offers as evidence of collective memory a
study that showed when people were given day-old <em>New
York Times </em>crossword puzzles, their collective scores went up 20%, even though they had never seen the puzzles before. Why?
Because others around them <em>had </em>seen these puzzles, and had somehow communicated their solutions to the test group via some sort
of collective consciousness.</font></p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">So our first wake-up call ends
with the Buddhist notions of the reality of the now, of the changing
self, and of the need for
mindfulness. Ironically, the Buddhist idea of a self constantly in flux
contradicts the much more substantial Vedantist self, which is one
with Brahman. Yet Linklater has allowed this contradiction to stand in
his film, seemingly embracing both sides of the dialectic at once.</font></p>
<hr>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium" size="4"><strong>
<img src="waking_essay_files/alexjones.jpg" align="left" border="0" height="210" hspace="8" width="263">3. Second Wake-Up Call: Existentialism and the Call to Freedom</strong></font></p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">The second wake up call in <em>Waking Life </em>comes
from existentialism, especially Jean-Paul Sartre's notions that we are
condemned to be
free, and that if we make excuses for our not having this freedom, we
are living in bad faith. Sartre distinguished in-itself physical
being, like that of rocks, which have no consciousness and thus no
freedom, from for-itself conscious being, which we human beings
have. As in-itself beings, we are fundamentally free to make our own
choices, to chart our own course in life. Brute matter may
frustrate our plans, yet we always have a choice. We are thrown into
this world, and it's up to us to do the best job we can at creating
our selves, much as an artist strives to paint an evocative painting, or
a sculptor chisels away at a mass of rock to create a compelling
statue.</font></p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">For Sartre, every time we make an
excuse for not doing something we desire or feel obligated to do, we
are living in bad faith. On
the other side, if we blindly follow the dictates of social custom or
the commands of others, and refuse to take responsibility for our
actions, we are once again in bad faith. Since we are responsible for
creating our own actions, we are responsible for creating our
selves. We need to wake up to the reality of this act of creation, of
our personal freedom. So the wake up call here is to freedom, to
the acceptance of a transcendent <em>being-for-itself</em> that isn't enchained by the grimy materialism of the body or by the slightly less grimy
socialization of our economic and social roles.</font></p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">The key scene here is Scene 3, Condemned to be Free, when Wiley Wiggins, our hero, visits Robert C. Solomon, an important
commentator on and champion of existential thought. He doesn't like the socially constructed and fragmented self of the
postmodernists: this just opens up a whole world of excuses. What we do in our lives does make a difference. In Solomon's own
words:</font></p>
<blockquote>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">[Solomon in the classroom]...
The reason why I refuse to take existentialism as just another French
fashion, or historical curiosity, is
that I think it has something very important to offer us for the new
century. I'm afraid we're losing the real virtues of living life
passionately, in the sense of taking responsibility for who you are, the
ability to make something of yourself and feeling good about
life. Existentialism is often discussed as if it's a philosophy of
despair, but I think the truth is just the opposite. Sartre once
interviewed
said he never really felt a day of despair in his life. The one thing
that comes out from reading these guys is not a sense of anguish
about life, so much as a real kind of exuberance, of feeling on top of
it. It's like, your life is yours to create... [Solomon and Wiley
walking] I've read the post-modernists with some interest, even
admiration. But, when I read them I always have this awful, nagging
feeling like something absolutely essential is getting left out. The
more that you talk about a person as a social construction, or as a
confluence of forces, or as fragmented or marginalized, what you do is
you open up a whole new world of excuses. And when Sartre
talks about responsibility, he's not talking about something abstract.
He's not talking about the kind of self or soul that theologians
would argue about. It's something very concrete; it's you and me
talking, making decisions, doing things and taking the consequences.
(<em>Waking Life, </em>Scene 3)</font></p>
</blockquote>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">Solomon's monologue hints at the
idea of everyday life held by most people, including the postmodernist
ideological justification of
this life: the idea that we are pushed and shoved by large institutions
like corporations and the state, or are trapped in our roles as
members of a given sex, race, or religion. The existentialists critique
this idea as radically underestimating our personal responsibility
for our actions. Given a Whiggish theory of history, one might think
that the more recent (historically speaking) postmodernists, with
their socially constructed view of the self, would trump the
"old-fashioned" existentialist view of the self as transcendental and
fundamentally free. But not so for Solomon, and one would imagine
Linklater. The fat lady has yet to sing in the arena of personal
responsibility. Matter and social roles are tests of our freedom: can we
transcend them, or do we surrender to in-itself being,
becoming moving blobs of flesh and bones animated by nothing more than
custom and habit?</font></p>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">Existentialist freedom arises
again in Scene 25, when Speed Levitch waves his hands like a sorcerer,
excitedly informing Wiley that:</font></p>
<blockquote>
<p><font face="Franklin Gothic Medium">
<img src="waking_essay_files/speedlevitch.jpg" align="right" border="0" height="210" hspace="6" width="263">We
are all co-authors of this dancing exuberance, for even our inabilities
are having a roast. We are the authors of ourselves, co-authoring a
gigantic Dostoevsky novel starring clowns. This entire thing we're
involved with called the world is an opportunity to
exhibit how exciting alienation can be. Life is a matter of a miracle
that is collected over time by moments flabbergasted to be in each
others' presence. The world is an exam, to see if we can rise into the
direct experiences. Our eyesight is here as a test, to see if we
can see beyond it. Matter is here as a test for our curiosity. Doubt is
here as an exam for our vitality. Thomas Mann wrote that he
would rather participate in life than write a hundred stories.
Giacometti was once run down by a car, and he recalled falling into a
lucid faint - a sudden exhilaration as he realized at last, something
was happening to him. (<em>Waking Life,
</em>Scene 25)</font></p>