Category Archives: failure

A bit more on Amy Tan

Well, I’m still researching Amy Tan–and I’m still being deliberately coy about exactly which aspect of her life will make it into my book–and I keep coming across all these other interesting things she has said.

From the same interview as in the previous post, here she is talking about success and failure, making them sound rather impostor-like:

And here she is describing how she found her authentic voice:

At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life. I wrote about a girl whose parents were educated, were professors at MIT. There was no Joy Luck Club, it was the country club. I tried to copy somebody’s style that I thought was very clever. I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn’t realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.

One day, after being told one of these stories didn’t work, I thought, “I’m just going to stop showing my work to people, and I’m just going to write a story. Make it fictional, but they’ll be Chinese-American.” What amazed me was: I wrote about a girl who plays chess and her mother is both her worst adversary and her best ally. I didn’t play chess, so I figured that counted for fiction, but I made her Chinese-American, which made me a little uncomfortable. By the end of this story I was practically crying. Because I realized that — although it was fiction and none of that had ever happened to me in that story — it was the closest thing of describing my life. Of the feelings that I had, of these things that my mother had taught me that were inexplicable or had no name. This invisible force that she taught me, this rebellion that I had. And then feeling that I had lost some power, lost her approval and then lost what had made me special. It was a magic turning point for me. I realized that was the reason for writing fiction. Through that, this subversion of myself, of creating something that never happened, I came closer to the truth. So, to me, fiction became a process of discovering what was true, for me. Only for me.

I went to a writer’s workshop. I met a wonderful writer there named Molly Giles. She looked at my work and said, “Where’s the voice? Where’s the story? There’s so many things that are happening that are not working, but there’s a possible beginning… So maybe you should think about this question, what is your voice?” That’s a question I still ask myself today as a writer.


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Churchill on well-disguised impostors

My book is about Kipling‘s notion that success and failure, or triumph and disaster, can be impostors. That does not mean, of course, that all triumphs and all disasters are always impostors. But to say that wittily, we really need ole Winston.

Churchill, as it happens, lived a life that in many ways illustrates Kipling’s impostors, but that’s for another post. Here is today’s anecdote:

After the Brits voted him out of office in the 1945 election (as a Thank You for winning the war–talk about impostor!), his wife said to him that this defeat might be a “blessing in disguise.”

“At the moment,” Churchill replied, “it seems quite effectivley disguised.”


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The suffering of Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten at Wikimedia Commons

Kahlo and Rivera. Photo by Carl Van Vechten, via Wikimedia Commons

I popped into the Frida Kahlo exhibition currently at the San Francisco MOMA. Mainly, to see her piercing paintings–and boy, do they pierce–but also, at least in part, as research for my book.

A friend of ours, Erika Lessey Chen, had suggested Kahlo to me a year ago as a possible life-story to look into. I had told Erika that I’m interested in people whose success (triumph) somehow turned into failure (disaster), or whose failure somehow turned into success, à la Kipling’s impostors.

Does Kahlo fit my story-line? Mostly, I’m looking at characters such as Hannibal’s enemy and nemesis Scipio to illustrate how disaster at the right moment in a life can liberate a person–set free his or her imagination and creativity, and thus initiate a much bigger triumph in the future. People such as J.K. Rowling and Steve Jobs.

But disaster can have other effects, of course. There is the strength that comes from overcoming it. I’ve mentioned Joe Biden and Demosthenes in that context. Among the main characters in my book, the person who would personify that is Fabius, the old Roman senator who was the only one not to despair after Hannibal’s crushing victories.

And Kahlo? As I walked through the exhibition and looked at her absolutely harrowing self-portraits, I realized that she had done something else again with her own disasters: She had made the disasters themselves the success.

Here she was on a hospital bed in Detroit, her body writhing and bleeding, with a uterus and a fetus torn out of her. She painted it after yet another miscarriage. The people in the exhibition became very quiet in front of that one.

There she was bound in a steel corset with a broken spinal column, her entire body pierced with nails. In this painting, she is all pain and frustrated sexual desire.

Over there she is sitting in a double-self-portrait, after her marriage to Diego Rivera had failed. She is holding hands with herself, and simultaneously tries and fails to stop the bleeding of her heart. (All these paintings seem to be copyrighted, so I don’t want to show them here.)

What were her disasters? The first was polio, which she caught at age six, and which left her right leg atrophied. The second was a bus accident when she was eighteen. She broke her spine, her pelvis, and lots of other bones, and an iron handrail pierced her uterus, leaving her infertile. The third, arguably, was falling in love with Diego Rivera, whom she adored but who was never faithful to her.

In short: pain, infertility, loneliness. And to deal with it, she painted. And the painting made her into the most “successful” Mexican artist ever.


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Which Bhagavad Gita?

“With no desire for success, no anxiety about failure, indifferent to results, he burns up his actions in the fire of wisdom. Surrendering all thoughts of outcome, unperturbed, self-reliant, he does nothing at all, even when fully engaged in actions.

There is nothing that he expects, nothing that he fears. Serene, free from possessions, untainted, acting with the body alone, content with whatever happens, unattached to pleasure or pain, success or failure, he acts and is never bound by his action.” (BG, 4.19-26)

Boom. Could anybody say it better? Who do you think did say it? Rudyard Kipling, whose two impostors are the seed of my entire book?

Actually, it was Krishna, in conversation with Arjuna, on the eve of an 18-day battle that would kill about four million (!) and which only eleven men would survive. Here are Arjuna and Krishna, his charioteer, in between the opposing armies just before the battle, as Krishna reveals to Arjuna the two crucial secrets to our lives: how to know and do your duty, and how to live.

I’m talking, of course, about one of the greatest poems (books, texts) ever written, the Bhagavad Gita, or “song of God”. It is a relatively short song inserted into a huge (!) epic story, the Mahabharata, which is several times the length of the Bible, or of the Iliad and Odyssey combined.

I’ve been re-reading the Gita in several translations while researching one chapter in my book. Why? Because Hannibal faced the same dilemma that Arjuna faced, when he broke down sobbing before the great battle, a battle that he suddenly did not want to fight at all, but which, as Krishna made him realize, he could not not fight. So Arjuna faced the same conundrum that Hannibal and Scipio faced: how to get into the right frame of mind to live life.

Oh, wait a minute. Did I say that Hannibal was in the same situation as Arjuna? I meant, that we all are in the same situation as both Arjuna and Hannibal. That is the point of the Gita, and also (more humbly) of my book.

Now, for those of you who love the Gita, I thought I’d do a quick review of the three translations and commentaries I’ve recently re-read. That way, maybe, I can help you choose the one that’s right for you.

The Gita is a poem in the original Sanskrit, and the translation that best preserves the beautiful, easy, fluid feel of a poem is the Bhagavad Gita by Stephen Mitchell (Three Rivers Press). The opening quote above comes from his translation.

A slightly less beautiful but perhaps more helpful and accessible translation is The Bhagavad Gita: A Walkthrough for Westerners by Jack Hawley (New World Library). The title sounds as if it were a sort of “For Dummies” version, but it’s not. It’s intelligent, and editorializes a bit whenever the words in the poem mean something very different from the same words in our ordinary language.

Then, of course, there is the intimidating two-volume brick God Talks with Arjuna: The Bhagavad Gita by Paramahansa Yogananda (Self-Realization Fellowship). That is the kosher version among yogis, because it’s academically and intellectually thorough. I’ve tried several times to get through it and failed. If it’s beauty, ease and enjoyment you’re looking for, don’t pick this one. But….

… do pick this one if you have even the slightest interest in a deeper understanding of the Gita. For example, the thing to get about the poem is that there are two battles going on: the external one involving four million warriors and elephants and chariots; and the internal one that we all wage every day. Paramahansa Yogananda is great at the genealogy of all the people in the war, so that you realize, for example, that Arjuna and his four brothers are the intelligent and higher parts of our mind, who are fighting 100 cousins, who are the powerful but lower parts of our mind, such as anger, desire, greed, and so forth.

Enjoy.


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The Narcissism of John Edwards: Impostor Success or Failure?

In my first preview of one of Kipling’s two impostors, triumph, I casually nodded to hubris as the most obvious mechanism that turns success into disaster, then went on to give another example that I thought was a bit subtler.

And now John Edwards forces me to come back to hubris. In case, you’ve been behind the moon, we now know that he cheated on his wife. More interestingly, we have now heard why he thinks he cheated. The key phrase in his mea culpa to ABC’s John Woodruff, was this: Becoming a “national public figure”, he said:

fed a self-focus, an egotism, a narcissism that leads you to believe you can do whatever you want, you’re invincible and there will be no consequences.

We always knew, of course, that Edwards had a narcissist in him, at least since we watched him preening here:

Narcissus, at least in Ovid’s version of the myth, was the handsome youth who fell in love with his own reflection as he bent down to drink from a stream, and then wouldn’t touch the water lest he ruffle the beautiful image in it, and so died of thirst. So it goes, as Vonnegut would say. Impostor beauty, as we might paraphrase.

So narcissism is slightly different from hubris, although Edwards conflates the two. Hubris is the classical Greek notion that power and success make people arrogant, and that this arrogance then invites disaster. Think Ken Lay, Eliot Spitzer, et cetera. And now, John Edwards?

Maybe, maybe not. I’ll give you one contra and one pro. The contra is Steven Berglas, a specialist in “narcissistic disorders” at Harvard Medical School for many years, who writes here that Edwards is kidding himself, and that it was in fact Edward’s failure to become Vice President in 2004 that is to blame:

I feel that Edwards had a need to re-assert his power and his masculinity (via an affair) because of his history of believing that his entire self-worth derived from success. Had Edwards not “proved his potency,” I feel he would have suffered ego-annihilation when he failed.

The pro comes from research by Cameron Anderson at Berkeley’s Haas School and Adam Galinsky at Northwestern, who found that perceived power does make people excessively optimistic and blind to risk. In one of their experiments, they discovered that those participants who were more powerful were less likely to use condoms. Who says academics never have fun?


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Kudos to other Hannibal lovers and thinkers

I’ve always noticed that, although Hannibal is ever so slightly less of a household name than, say, Alexander or Caesar (or should that be because, rather than although?), he seems to have the more passionate, sophisticated and thoughtful following.

Read, for instance, 100falcons on the subjects of Hannibal’s most ingenious trick, his famous boyhood vow to his father, and some of the lessons that Hannibal has to teach us.

In my book and this blog, I’ll be offering my own lessons. But today I’ll just quote excerpts from 100falcons’:

1. Take the initiative, keep the initiative. […] His enemy had constantly to try to guess his intention and defend himself against several alternative attacks. The enemy Roman consul was forever on the defensive, waiting, wondering, guessing, bracing himself for the blow. […]

2. Be quick. Surprise. Hannibal decamped by night from Capua and got to Rome before the Romans in Capua ever realized he was gone. He crossed Etruria through a swamp because that was the way everyone assumed he wouldn’t go.

3. Be crafty, lay a trap. [see also: Hannibal’s most ingenious trap] ….

4. Be flexible. Have a plan but be able to alter it or even drop it as circumstances change. […]

5. […] Think two steps ahead, not just one.

6. Understand your enemy; learn his weaknesses. Hannibal always sent out spies to learn the enemy’s plans. He interviewed prisoners and guides to get information. As soon as new Roman consuls were given command, he sent informers to find out who they were. Was the new general a hothead? Had he ever led troops in battle? What was the result? Was he cocky or impatient, did he like to tip the bottle? […]

7. Be daring. Come down with your army across the Alps with elephants and attack Rome on Roman ground, far from your own country and without logistic support except what you can steal.

8. Keep your mouth shut. Hannibal never told anyone what he was doing.

9. Be all of the above except when you are faced with an enemy who is all of the above. In that case, be like Fabius, […]

My comment at this stage is that the above lessons fall into the how-to-win category. Some of my lessons will zoom out to contemplate how you can win and yet–mysteriously–lose. That, of course, is half of the point of my book, which is that success can be one of Kipling’s impostors.

Incidentally, Erikatakacs left a comment underneath 110falcons’ post which he/she then began to answer in another post. In essence: why on earth did Hannibal not take Rome itself? Isn’t that why he went to Italy in the first place? Well, there are good reasons why he did not. But this also presents us with his fascinating paradox. If he was so good at thinking several steps ahead (as in Lesson Nr 5 above), why didn’t he… think that one extra step ahead as well. Let’s remember, that this winner ended up …. losing! Kipling indeed.


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Impostor Failure, Part III: Lincoln, Beatles, Disney … everybody!

And we haven’t even got to Hannibal, Fabius and Scipio yet!

Anyway, watch this, courtesy (with thanks) of Kate:


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Impostor Failure, Part II: J.K. Rowling

In my post on Steve Jobs, I suggested that his biggest failure in life turned out–certainly in his own opinion–to be a liberating event that made possible his subsequent success. In other words, his failure was an impostor, just as Rudyard Kipling would say. In this post, I want to suggest the exact same thing, with a different example: one that is female, creative, vulnerable, touching. The example of J.K. Rowling.

Rowling is one of the most successful book authors of all time, and the most successful by far of those alive today. Who knows? Her Harry Potter books may yet become classics that endure down the ages. Rowling herself would be thrilled, because she loves classics and studied them, to the distress of her poor (literally) parents, who wanted her to study something “useful”. As a classics fiend myself (in a world of blank stares whenever anything Greek or Roman comes up), I love her just for that.

But let’s get to her “failure”. Her commencement address at Harvard this year was, in its entirety, a paean to failure–its ability to help a young person navigate life and to liberate her imagination. For the first nine minutes, she reminds her audience of (mostly) successful Harvard graduates and parents of her own family’s crushing poverty when she went to university, but says that “What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.” Then failure came:

… by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

She did not see it at the time, but this turned out to be a liberating event, rather as Steve Jobs’ career disaster at the age of thirty had been for him:

Here are the key passages:

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

More disasters followed. She lost her mother, she thought of killing herself, she was depressed. But she kept writing–in cafés, whenever her baby daughter fell asleep–and letting her imagination range freely as it now, after failure, could. The irony would soon be complete: several publishers turned down her Harry Potter story! Even her book, in other words, began as a failure. Then, one publisher took it. And the rest, as they say, is history.


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Impostor Disaster, part I: Steve Jobs

Back to the book: Remember, the whole book is a long story woven around Rudyard Kipling’s poetic insight that triumph and disaster are impostors. I want to lead up to the main character, Hannibal, with a few other examples, and today Steve Jobs comes to mind. I saw him on a stage last month, launching the new iPhone, and he looked as haggard and emaciated as death. He had had–and, he said, beaten–pancreatic cancer, and everybody in the audience must have been wondering whether it had come back. Now, people are beginning to discuss his mortality more openly, for instance here and here. Jobs talked about his encounter with cancer in a commencement address he gave at Stanford in 2005. I want to talk about that speech, but not about the part where he discusses cancer (which starts at about 8 minutes, 40 seconds), even though it lends my focus some poignancy.

What hit me were his thoughts (from minute 6 to about 8 ) on the biggest failure and disaster in his life (before cancer, that is). Watch:

Just to recap, he founded Apple and it was the passion and meaning of his life, and then, at age thirty, he fell victim to a boardroom coup and was fired from his own company. He was devastated. He spent over a decade drifting from one thing to another, thinking he was lost. But, he says:

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

Soon it turned out that the things he was dabbling in had a meaning that would become clear. In his exile, he founded NeXT, took over Pixar, fell in love and started a family. And then … Apple bought NeXT, and he was back where he belonged, only now changed. In his second coming, Apple would become more successful than he could have dreamed in his first coming, and:

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.

I highlighted the words lightness and freed me for a reason. That is because one theme I’m exploring in the book–again, I’m always in search of the wisdom behind Kipling’s impostors–is the potential of disaster or failure to liberate. Liberate from what? I’ll get to that.


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