On Ambition

Ambition has taken new meaning in my life. In transitioning from school to work, the definition of that word, ambition, has changed. It has become an entirely different entity; a fundamental one nearly unrivaled in its intersectionality. 

 

Within the educational framework, ambition can manifest clearly. Do well and succeed in school to express that urge to thrive. Get good grades, excel in extracurriculars, score high on standardized tests. Direct effort and desire into this channel for a positive outcome, a straightforward, worthy, beneficial, rewarding, agreed-upon path in every sense. Not the only one, but a definitive one. 

Now, outside school, ambition has morphed into a more malleable, individualized force. There isn't such linear validation for achievement. Pursuit has become far more of a private affair, almost entirely self-motivated and self-disciplined. 

Down which endless avenue to travel? How to express this complicated emotion against the wide expanse? When is it too far, not enough, when is the time to change course, when to know if it's too late? How long to postpone these questions?

The future nags at my mind, always pestering, lobbying, for a seat at the table.

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Though not usually discussed in this way, I believe ambition is a foundational characteristic of people. It's based on everything in a life and it molds everything in a life. In the web of neurons that make the soul, ambition must be somewhere near the centre, a filter through which every little spark flying across the cortices must traverse. 

 

You can see it, or the lack of it, instantaneously. In body language. In the minute facial muscles. In the eyes, too. It's written all over everybody. 

 

But what exactly is ambition? I'm not sure any questions can be answered without knowing this one. What does it mean? What is its nature? Why does it take the forms it does?

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In The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie, a character named Saladin has ambition rooted in inferiority. His greatest desire is to escape India, not just the physical place but from the land built into his DNA too, the core self that can never be escaped, the identity that must be eventually reconciled. He fetishizes England as the superior alternative. Everything he does is cloaked underneath suffocating intentions.

The more he tries, the more the world rejects his dreams, his pleas, his gnarled ambition guarded by thorns of hatred and repression. Like Tony Montana in Scarface, Saladin struggles against a Karmic world that laughs at his feeble thrusts. The futility of unchecked drive is shown at every turn. We know of its dangers.

But on the flipside, to have ambition, I think, one must have great hope. There must be true belief in a brighter tomorrow, a purpose worth working for and towards. Ambition is often cast as a destructive vice, but it's optimism too. Finely balanced, the ambitious person might be the one with the most faith. 

Ambition is also far from sedentary. I think it is a learned behavior, not just something ingrained in personalities at birth. It's something that can be developed. Which means everyone has a chance to see a better life ahead. Perspective is everything, and perspective can be changed.

History musings

Certain things stick in history. They can be framed in the moment as defining of a time and place. A singular flash-bang event, or maybe a powerful individual, a monumental struggle, a movement. Things can also gain historical status after the fact thanks to later occurrences, having initially been not so obviously deserving of space in the pantheon of the human story. Only in hindsight may the pieces of a larger picture come to the fore.

I've been reading a collection of short writings by Hunter S. Thompson a few entries at a time. They're consistently filled with creative insults and sardonic insights on the world of the 1980s. 

At the time Thompson was deep in the Beltway covering politics even though he lived in the mountains of Colorado. A big topic he writes on for months in the late 80s, during the run-up to the 1988 GOP Nomination, is the Iran-Contra Affair. Thompson describes the scandal as equal or more damning to Reagan, his legacy, and his party, as Watergate was to its perpetrator, Richard Nixon. 

Now we know Iran-Contra had nowhere near the impact to Reagan that Watergate did to his sleazy precursor. At the time, though, it seems people misjudged the Reagan scandal as more historically significant than it has turned out to be (at least, so far). Today, Iran-Contra hardly makes high school history textbooks, much less general knowledge. And Reagan's reputation is definitely not tarnished by it. 

In case you don't know about Iran-Contra, it's basically this: 

The Reagan administration was secretly selling weapons to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran (who, by the way, we opposed in the horrific Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88 by selling weapons to his opponent, Saddam Hussein in Iraq (the one we later killed to bring freedom and peace to the Middle East), but only for a bit, because we could make even more of a killing (haha get it) selling weapons to both Iraq AND Iran), a country which we had an active embargo against, using Israel as the go-between money-for-missiles launderer, which is a country definitely not recognized as legitimate by the Iranian Revolutionary government, to fund a gang of human-rights-abusing Nicaraguans called the Contras who were rampaging across the land with American-taxpayer-funded assault rifles to destroy the Sandinistas, a Leninist group of human-rights-abusers that took power from the dynastic dictatorship of the Somoza family (don't worry, also human-rights-abusers) in 1979 in the shitshow that was 20th century politics in Central America. Classic Cold War America stuff.

It's complicated. Brown has a good database on the whole thing if you really want to get into it. I digress. 

I was recently reminded by this Ted talk on confirmation bias of another event that has taken a roundabout route to infamy: The Dreyfus Affair. It was taught in my school as a sign of the ingrained European anti-Semitism and continent-wide persecution, oppression, and inequality of Jews that continued past the Industrial Revolution. 

 

(I'm not going to get into the details of this one. One rant per post is my self-imposed limit).

At the time of it happening in the late 19th century, the trial of Alfred Dreyfus was big news in France, and probably some other countries too. Big enough for Emile Zola to publish a letter about it that got him some jail time. 

But the Holocaust is the headliner in history that the Dreyfus Affair is a piece of context for. That's the reason teenagers in Texas are taught about it 120 years later; a genocide that happened decades after, an event that, like everything in the future, could not have been predicted with precision, defines The Dreyfus Affair in historiography. 

This makes me wonder whether something like Iran-Contra could become a more notable historical marker because of some future event. Or maybe the future event has already happened, but only later will people deem it important enough to highlight. It almost makes me want to place no historical judgement on anything. 

Then, I guess, I would be isolated from the process of creating history. That seems fundamentally un-human. Despite the ever-changing content of our remembered past, it still has to be a rock for society. I'm just curious how it will look long after I'm gone.

Irish Lit

The image that engulfed my mind from James Joyce's semi-autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is that of a droplet of water plopping onto a still pond; that sound, so pointed and specific you can hear it clear as day, so quiet, subtle. Or the light crinkle of a page when turned in a silent room, the fickle tear through a cloak of invisible fabric.

 

Karl Ove Knausgaard calls it "Mood" 

As a reader I felt I was repeatedly dropped beneath the surface tension of the protagonist's life, a boy named Stephen Dedalus. I popped in and out of his childhood to observe his actions, follow his thoughts, see him grow. The novel is a remarkable piece of self-analysis, a delicate and intimate look that feels nearly intrusive at times. 

The narrative is layers of implied context, symbolism, and imagery hidden between the lines. Near everything is hinted at rather than explicit. There is tranquil depth to this novel.

I found it to be quite daring as well. Especially in the opacity of time, and the manner in which Joyce toys with the English language like its his clay to mold. At certain points I literally had to stop reading for a moment, in awe at the crafting of a sentence, re-reading it for further appreciation. The vocabulary and tone, often rhythmic like a rap, experimental even a century after publish. 

The story is ultimately about the creation of a young man under heavy influence of the Catholic Church, late-19th century aristocratic Ireland, industrialization, social masculinity, nationalism, and all the other domestic, interpersonal, and internal chaos we all live with regardless of setting. I found the role of religion in Joyce's life similar to its place in James Baldwin's life as detailed in Go Tell It on the Mountain: a deeply rooted pillar with divine proportion, an icon that must inevitably be confronted in a process that will fundamentally change life. 

They both tell their stories, swarming with the details of a life now gone, yet still universal at its core.

It's also beyond impressive when a writer can encapsulate the viewpoint of a child in their work. To build a cohesive narrative and transfer it, convincingly and accurately, via a child's eyes to an older reader without either side getting lost, that takes a special understanding. Like Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury. 

 

The copy I have is a jacket-less blue hardback printed in the 90s. Its pages are sharp white and fresh, and the smooth front cover has a black rectangle with the following centered between its borders: 

 

James Joyce

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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

 

I felt like this book, more than probably anything I've read, touches down like a landing spacecraft in another person's life. It's like opening a portal to a soul.