Thursday

Today is Thursday. The weather started out very nice today, in the mid 60s. I did not wear a coat to work. Despite the nice weather, I took the subway, I was 60 pages away from finishing Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom, and, since I planned to finish last night, I wanted to get as much done as possible. Work has been calm lately and not too busy, but I didn't want to take any chances. One never knows when the phone call will come and I will lose my free time. Today, I did not do much work. I ate lunch out, Blue Fin, and went to the gym to see Emilie from 2-3. Then I called Samar to arrange the itinerary for South Africa. By about 5, I had only billed 3.75 hours. I did get another assignment today, but nothing that is going to be time sensitive, so I left around 7:15 and took the subway home -- again, more time for reading. With a slight detour on the subway and the broken elevator, it took almost an hour to get home. At home, I finished Mandela's autobiography.

It was an interesting read. Sorry, that's a bit of an understatement and the dry tone in my head doesn't really translate. Mandela is a good, clear writer, but not creative or inventive. One can see the methodical planning that made him such an effective political leader and innovator, but as the author of a 625 page book, his style is a little stiff. The first half of the book is about his upbringing and path into politics. The problem I was having was that there was no way to tell from his formative years how or why he stood apart. Indeed, I would say that as a literary figure, he does not become a leader until after he has been imprisoned for several years, past when he was considered a leader by members of his organization and constituency. Almost as if he needed to be a leader in the eyes of others before he considered himself to be one or truly acted as one. Maybe it is the reality that one cannot lead until after there are people who will follow that lead. I am interested in how he became such a leader in the eyes of the people. What is it about someone that turns them from an ordinary person to a freedom fighter or revolutionary to a true leader, born up by the masses. To compare him to a politician in America is an interesting enterprise, since he did not have any of the modern American political machinery to announce his name and his politics. In addition, he was imprisoned for so long, yet again, from literary interpretation, his stature only seemed to grow. It was in prison that he distinguished himself from the other revolutionary leaders who were his compatriots.

I was also comparing the regime of South Africa to those in South America. The ANC and other groups in South Africa had certain advantages which made their form of protest -- the slow-downs, the rallies -- successful and possible, and ironically, the advantages stemmed from the control exercised by the colonial rulers and the legacy of British Imperialism. Mandela could, at times, invoke certain rules of law, and demand that the protesters were treated fairly under the laws. Whatever the laws at the time were (except the very last years where it seems the government learned that if they wanted to get serious about suppressing the people, they could not be hampered by the rule of law), the government would obey them. In contrast, in the South American dictatorships, headed not by imperial forces, there was no rule of law. People simply disappeared. The revolutionaries could not appeal to the court system for justice because the government did not have laws that even nominally protected dissenting voices. Those governments were brutal and paid no lip service to protecting the rights of those who disagreed with them. One thing Mandela said over and over again was the oppressing party dictated the terms of the struggle. Those who were challenging the government's policies had to respond in the manner in which they were treated. In India, the government allowed protest and dissent, which in turn meant that Ghandi could demonstrate by walking though the country and preaching nonviolence as a means of rejecting colonial rule. Similarly, MLK Jr. could practice the same non-violence because in America, his right to protest freely was recognized, if not always accepted. In contrast, in South America, a protester could not more begin to speak against the government before being shot, imprisoned or tortured, with no chance of appealing to a higher power for protection. Maybe that is why there were more rebels in countries trying to overturn the dictatorships than there were revolutionaries in the Western understanding of the term. Of course, I am showing my ignorance in not remembering which countries had dictatorships where people were disappeared.

At the end of the book, when the power was really going to shift and Mandela, in his 80s, was elected president, I actually became more agitated. At what price was his freedom, and what would the people who fought so hard, who died, paying the ultimate price, think? Those who died, would they think their sacrifices worth while, especially because in the end it was through peaceful negotiation and compromise. With the transition away from apartheid being so moderate and their sacrifice being so extreme. Maybe it was the disconnect that struck me so forcefully. Their deaths were unnecessary, clearly, but the fact that their deaths did not lead to unilateral victory that I guess makes it hard for me to reconcile. Or maybe the fact that Mandela himself never talks about being tortured or injured in the struggle. Throughout he remains the great statesmen who is untouched by the violence. Those who were tortured, hanged, beaten, or shot, by contrast seem like a corollary, unrelated to the final pressures that forced the government's position to the negotiation table. I know that this was not the message that I was supposed to receive, and that Mandela, if he read this, would strenuously disagree with what I took away.

A long lead up to my personal experience with death and probably what caused my internal struggle at the end of the book. Brian's death for me was very personal. He was mine. He didn't belong to a group, not in the sense of membership, but in the sense of ownership. Mandela spends parts of the book discussing how a freedom fighter cannot also really be a family man. He has chosen as his family the people that he represents. Mandela struggles with this, wondering if his choices were based on selfishness in that he put the struggle to end apartheid above the needs of his family to have a father and a more stable life. Brian never made that kind of decision and would never make that decision. He was a person of the world, but the natural world rather than the civilized world. He was not motivated by politics or interpersonal interactions, but with interactions between man and the natural world. Unlike many of the enlightenment philosophers, Brian would not agree that politics was necessary for the development of humankind or that civilization was a necessary engine for personal development. The connection that his teacher made at his funeral with Emerson was very appropriate. Maybe she grasped instinctively what I have been struggling to say for the past ten minutes. Democratic government, going back to the ancient Greeks is based on the principle that not only must the government be based on popular opinion, but that such a form of government is vital to the growth and development of the human spirit. We are not humans unless we are participating in decisions that create the structure under which we exist. I think Brain, if pushed, would ultimately think that civilization, instead of revealing our true identities, stifled our natural creativity. That it made us lie to ourselves and to others about what we really wanted and about what made us happy. In fact, that as long as we ascribed to the rules of society, we could not be happy. Discourse, instead of leading to enlightenment, caused confusion and distortion of what was really important. All this made him all the more mine (and Amy's and Susan's and Jim's).

All this is to say is that the public nature of the deaths of those who fought apartheid in South Africa brought home how personal Brian's death was for me, and how now, over two years later, I still am struggling to find some peace with it. Did Mandela have this same struggle. He lost two of his children, one close after his birth, the other to a car accident when he was in his 20s. Did those deaths completely change his world view? Neither were connected to the apartheid regime, did the fact that death could happen randomly shape his personal philosophy? I have always fought the idea when people ask me if I am okay, if I have my closure, if I am over it. But in a sense, I know I need something. Or maybe I just want something, an ability to say, okay, Brian is dead, but I have made my peace with it. I want to be able to have a normal relationship without constantly thinking of him. I am obsessed with his approval. Would he be proud of me, would Brain think this is a valuable use of my time. What would he think to know that I spend my evening reading a book and then writing on a blog that no one read? Some evenings he didn't mind doing things like this. A lot of our evenings were very quite -- we often bored ourselves. But in death, I let the idea of him judge all of my actions. Brian would be taking advantage of living in this city. Brian wouldn't be doing a job that he didn't love; Brian wouldn't wait to decorate his apartment and would keep it clean. Would Brian, in his death, think that I was making the most of the fact that I had been given life? On these matters, I want to both break Brian's hold of me and to please him. Fundamentally, I think we differed on our world views. For all that he was an extrovert, he both defined himself and was defined by nature -- an individual in the broadest sense of the world, formed by his interactions with himself and his own soul, for lack of a better description. When I try to think of a way to explain this, all I can think of is Brian, on the top of a mountain, valleys, forests, and rolling hills to one side, shrouded in fog, and maybe on the other cliffs and the ocean -- much like the hike we took in the week after we died in Carmel -- with his hands thrown up over his head, taking in the vastness of sky. He defined himself in relation to the indefiniteness of nature, mountains, sky, the ocean. Human existence, in relation to all of this would just be a blink, destroyed as quickly as it was created. For all that I am an introvert, I am a creature of society and am formed my interactions with others, my history is not the billion year old creation of Earth, but the much shorter history of man and his struggle to find a way to life with other men, to communicate and to form structures within which interactions are possible. To see those interactions become more and more complicated, to see man become more complicated in turn.

I started this post so I could explore my recent feelings about Brain, but it didn't turn out that way. Probably because I don't have the words to describe the changes he and his death have caused in me and what I am feeling right now, other than confused and uncomfortable; recognizing that it has been too long for me to still be at such a stage of emotional and personal turmoil, that is not "healthy" -- ahh, that word I hate -- and that I don't seem to be "progressing" or "healing" but instead seem to be irrevocably caught in this net of uncertainly and insecurity and bad alliteration. Anyway, I have been at this an hour and a half. Its probably time to stop.