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On Waiting:
Simple Lessons from Bogart, Bergman and Mandela
28 February 2007
நெஞ்சம் உண்டு, நேர்மை உண்டு, ஓடு ராஜா
நேரம் வரும் காத்திருந்து பாரு ராஜா...
Lyric:
Kavi Arasu
Kannadasan
Bogart and
Bergman in Casablanca
Count me in
as one of the thousands Humphrey Bogart�s fans, who marked the 50th
death anniversary of Bogie silently. Bogart bid permanent adieu to his adoring
fans on January 14, 1957. To remember Bogie, I re-read the 50th
Anniversary Commemorative volume of �Casablanca: As Time Goes By� (1992)
authored by Frank Miller, and also Ingrid Bergman�s autobiography �My Story�
(1981).
So much has
been written about the Casablanca the movie and the lucent on-screen
chemistry between the two lead stars � Bogart (1899-1957) and Ingrid Bergman
(1915-1982). Even 65 years after its release in 1942, Casablanca - the
black and white movie, with only 100 minutes of running time - still ranks in
the top five of millions of movie fans� lists. The plot is deceptively simple
and the moral in the plot is also faultless; the hero and heroine sacrificing
their personal affection in the altar of a higher ideal of fighting the threat
of Aryan Nazis.
For this
movie fan, Casablanca also shines as a lucid example for the �waiting�
phenomenon. Ilsa Lund (played by Bergman) was waiting for her husband Victor
Lazlo (played by Paul Henreid), who was the leader of the anti-Nazi underground
movement, to return. Then, she falls in love with the cynical American Rick
Blaines (played by Bogart) in Paris. One of the touching moments in the movie
was Rick waiting for Ilsa at the Paris station, but he founds out from the
farewell letter-note delivered to him by Sam (played by Dooley Wilson), that she
has deserted him. The note says:
On Waiting: Simple Lessons from Bogart, Bergman and
Mandela
�Richard,
I cannot
go with you or ever see you again. You must not ask why. Just believe that I
love you. Go, my darling, and God Bless you.
Ilsa�
Rick reads
the letter while being drenched in rain. Michael Curtiz, the Hungary-born
director who was known to mangle English, was a master in using objects to pour
emotion, and it showed up in this particular frame shot. Rain drops doubled as
Ilsa�s tears, smearing the letter.
The
popularity of Casablanca also lies in this simple fact that all around
the world, millions of Ilsas and Ricks would have experienced the same emotion
of waiting for their lovers in a station, only to feel that they had been
deserted by intervening circumstances.
Rick then
starts his new career in Casablanca as a caf� owner. And to his surprise Ilsa,
his old flame of Paris, turns up in his caf� with her husband Victor Lazlo. It�s
the same woman who had passed the farewell note to him with the curt rejection
�I cannot go with you or ever see you again.� To express his annoyance, Rick
utters one of the classic lines of the movie; �Of all the gin joints in all
the cities in all the world, she walks into mine.� Following the landing of
Victor and Ilsa in Rick�s Caf�, the story spins around their attempt to escape.
Many other refugees, like the Victor-Ilsa couple, were also anxiously waiting
around Rick�s Cafe to begin a new life in a new continent, and were waiting for
transit permits/ exit visas.
The
prevailing confusion during the shooting of the movie had been neatly summed up
by Ingrid Bergman. On any day of the shooting, the actors were waiting for the
delivery of their script lines. To quote Bergman,
��There
had to be all sorts of changes in the script. So every day we were shooting
off the cuff: every day there were handing out the dialogue and we were
trying to make some sense of it. No one knew where the picture was going and
no one knew how it was going to end, which didn�t help any of us with our
characterization��
Bergman
continued,
�It was
ridiculous. Just awful. Michael Curtiz didn�t know what he was doing because
he didn�t know the story either. Humphrey Bogart was mad because he didn�t
know what was going on, so he retired to his trailer��
With all the
confusion during shooting, Bogart, Bergman and director Curtiz were able to turn
out a Hollywood classic; which only proved beyond doubt that they were
professionals of supreme caliber. There�s more �waiting� themes associated with
the Casablanca movie. Until the last day of Casablanca shooting,
Ingrid Bergman was agonizingly waiting to land her next movie role. And Bogart,
until he signed up for Casablanca, had starred in ruffian roles for over
a decade, and this was his first opportunity to play a romantic lead opposite to
a top ranked actress. Thus he was also waiting to prove his mettle as a romantic
Hollywood hero.
Mandela
Waiting in Prison
Depending on
the special value one attaches to concepts, property and persons, the waiting
time may last from minutes to years. Just think for a while that Nelson Mandela
(b.1918) waited for his dignified freedom from White Man�s prison for more than
26 years. He had felt in his heart that it was worth the wait, rather than
receiving a conditional freedom he was offered by his oppressors, after being
held captive for 20 years.
Mandela�s
statement delivered on February 10, 1985, in response to the then South African
President Botha�s offer of �Conditional Release� is a beauty for its poetic
cadence. Here is an excerpt:
�What
freedom am I being offered while the organization of the people remains
banned?
What
freedom am I being offered when I may be arrested on a pass offense?
What
freedom am I being offered to live my life as a family with my dear wife who
remains in banishment in Brandfort?
What
freedom am I being offered when I must ask for permission to live in an
urban area?
What
freedom am I being offered when I need a stamp in my pass to seek work? What
freedom am I being offered when my very South African citizenship is not
respected?
Only free
men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts��
Waiting for a
de jure Eelam
For whatever
its worth, how many had bothered to read the Feb.25th revelatory comments of
Robert Blake, the American ambassador to Sri Lanka, to the New Delhi
correspondent of Indo Asian News Service (IANS). He had been quoted as saying:
�I don�t
think a military solution is possible without a parallel political strategy.
The LTTE has significant capability to attack, using terrorist means. We
should not underestimate that. I think there would be costs (to pay) to a
military strategy. The most important thing in our view is to come up with a
credible (political) process.�
One cannot
fault Mr.Blake�s common sense about LTTE�s military vigor, since it is based on
ground realities which he would have assessed since he began his ambassador
assignment in September 2006. But Mr.Blake can be well assured that nothing
�credible� will be presented by President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his coterie to
satisfy the Eelam Tamils and LTTE by September 2009, when he completes his
nominal three year assignment. On this, he can check with his predecessors.
My pragmatic
suggestion to the American ambassador is that, though he cannot change the
mentality and the world view of Sinhalese political leadership (which is akin to
straightening a dog�s tail) he should contemplate on issues which are within his
parish. LTTE was designated as a �foreign terrorist organization� by the USA
bureaucrats in 1997.
Eelam Tamils
have been waiting for a reversal of this designation, and they would be ever
grateful if Mr.Blake can make any sincere effort (based on ground realities) to
reverse this bureaucratic fiat. The only criterion which need to be considered
is whether during this ten year period, LTTE has �terrorised� any American lives
or properties and has faced conviction in a court of law? South African
visionary leader Mandela�s case should be a pointer for American policy makers.
Until his release from prison in February 1990, Mandela also was designated by
the blind-sighted American Poo-Bahs as a �terrorist�.
Arnold
Goldberg�s 1971 Essay: �On Waiting�
Life is a
process of waiting, beginning with the pregnant mother waiting for the delivery
of her child, the child pushed along the conveyer-belt of life processes at
appropriate junctions and ultimately the old soul waiting for relief in the form
of death to escape from the worn-out physical carcass. Between birth and death,
we wait and wait and wait. We wait for everything from A to Z; appointments,
births, children, deaths, elections, freedom, garbage truck, health recovery,
ideas, judgements from superiors, kudos, letters, mates, name recognition,
opportunities, peace, quality time, relief, sleep, transport, university
entrance, visas, wound healing, yield in [one�s] investment, zenith of [one�s]
career.
More than
five years ago, I read a 1971 essay entitled �On Waiting� by Arnold Goldberg,
which had appeared in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, and
was captivated by its charm and its metaphorical allure to the Eelam scene.
Since it�s a lengthy 9-page essay with in-depth details on psychoanalysis, I
provide below only excerpts in which the general thoughts about waiting have
been covered.
Excerpts from Arnold Goldberg�s Essay:
[courtesy: International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 1971; vol.52,
pp.413-421]
The
intent of this essay is to examine the experience of waiting or the
subjective sense of time passage by the psychoanalytic method�.
The
Psychoanalytic Aspect of Waiting
All of
us wait. Some tolerate it well and some poorly. It is sometimes considered a
virtue and sometimes a necessary evil. In countries such as England it is
quite common for people to line up to wait in an orderly and dignified
manner for a bus or a service; but, on occasion, in the United States we
push and shove and cannot wait for what we want. We do feel we have to learn
to wait, that it is something that comes with time and perhaps maturity;
however, there is, in all of us, a lurking antagonism to waiting. We bear
waiting, but we probably rarely try to understand it�
Waiting as such is not usually considered in the psychoanalytic literature,
but associated phenomena such as timing and the sense of time, impatience
and urgency are focal concepts�
The
developmental continuum of waiting
Waiting is an act of suspension. Langer (1967) states:
�The
principle of waiting is clearly exemplified in the conjoint actions of
multi-enzyme systems, in which not the fastest but the slowest catalyst
involved in a transformation is the �pace-maker�, since chemical reactions
are not driven by successive impulses, but require their own exact times, so
that complex cycles are possible only if the faster reactions can be
suspended until the slowest is completed.�
She
further quotes Ephraim Racker as saying: �When a steady state is established
the rate of the overall process is governed by the rate of the slowest
reaction. Then each step proceeds at the same rate.�
In
parallel fashion we may hypothesize that the development of the psyche
involves multiple repeated suspensions to allow the slower reactions to be
integrated and that the inability or incapacity to wait can indicate both
the very issue of change and its resulting (temporary) lack of integration
as well as indicating (at times) primitiveness and its absence of
integration.
The
infant who cannot wait to be fed and literally cries until the food reaches
his stomach is considered the prototype of impatience. However, the infant
may be considered as multiple non-integrated aspects of psychic functioning
which discharge at different rates and at different times. The slowest part
of the system that the hungry infant�s psyche cannot wait for, the slowest
reaction that governs the rate of the entire system, is the mother who has
to prepare the food. In this system the pacemaker is outside of the psyche
and not properly a psychoanalytic model of impatience but rather a two-party
social phenomenon.
Freud
(1926) postulated the hallucinated breast as the intrapsychic component
which completes the wait�
The
observation of infants and children reveals that often the sight of the
mother preparing the food allows for waiting. The growing child experiences
the feeling of omnipotence and control which in effect is the precursor of
his own capacity to gratify himself. As the child sees the mother prepare
food he experiences his own fantasied or imagined control over food
preparation�
One
sees the manifestation of waiting as pleasure in the variety of experiences
which involve the building up of tensions, the lengthening and drawing out
of the tensions and the careful regulation to the point of discharge.
The
Anguish of Waiting
For
some people waiting is intolerable. Even brief periods of waiting cause
discomfort and prolonged waits are unbearable. They �climb the walls� or
�crawl out of their skins� or are �about to burst�. The end of waiting is
not a pleasure but a relief and thought hey may somewhat masochistically get
involved in waiting episodes, they experience such periods with anxiety and
dread. There is another and different quality added to that of the building
up of drive tension. Based on the model of development it would appear that
this torment is related to an external source needed to afford relief. The
person not only depends on someone else but is literally at the mercy of
another�
No
doubt the variable estimates of how long one has waited or how long a given
period of time is judged to be has no unitary explanation. Phenomena such as
novelty or pleasure versus boredom play a significant role�
The
Benefits of Waiting
Shakespeare has Iago say:
How
poor are they that have not patience
What wound did ever heal but by degrees
Thou know�st we work by wit and not by witchcraft
And wit depends on dilatory time
This
quotation serves well as an analytic credo because the mainstay of analytic
insight is the slow accumulation of fact and connexion. Waiting involves a
process which is allowed to finish, is seen to its end. Certainly we allow
for our own arbitrary choices of beginnings and ends, but within any
enormous or infinite process there are subcycles or processes with limiting
boundaries.
Wounds
take time to heal, children take time to grow and knowledge takes time to
accumulate. There is no doubt that the very quality of the passage of time
has a salutary effect on these processes. Such principles as organizing,
integrating and maturing are those involving slow gathering together,
arranging and hierarchical regulation. Children learn by the organizing of
words into sentences, into integrative jumps of conceptual thinking.
Emerging nations develop by fits and starts, by integrative jumps and by a
kind of maturational process peculiar to themselves but certainly requiring
time. Mature nations often take longer to make decisions or to respond to
provocations and hopefully have more positive qualities such as patience�
Some Aspects of Applied Psychoanalysis of Waiting
Waiting and patience are such ubiquitous themes in art, music and literature
that no survey could be exhaustive. We are all familiar with the build-up of
tension of musical themes as we wait for the release that never comes. The
fade-out in motion pictures has taught us all that we need not wait and time
has passed in that brief black space. In the theatre, Beckett has
beautifully demonstrated the dilemma of a man in Waiting for Godot.
This play and its sequel, Endgame, illustrate (for some in a slow,
boring and unending manner) the issue of man as he waits for his meaning or
his fate or his death�
Another illustration that may be of interest is that of the person in
confinement. The prisoner waits to be released or else resigns himself to a
life of incarceration. The initial anxiety of waiting for release subsides
and then returns as the date approaches. This is equally true of the
confinement of pregnancy. The serenity of the pregnant woman (sometimes used
to explain the Mona Lisa mystery) is that of the women who waits in a
beautiful and controlled manner when she feels her self-continuity and
self-control are heightened. She knows when and how long she must wait, and
anxiety only returns with the indefiniteness of the final hours. Women with
a shaky feeling of self-continuity are more terrified than pacified by
pregnancy, which is but another threat to holding themselves together.
The
act of creation per se, either in a work of art or in a pregnancy, consists
of organization and arrangement over a time period, with waiting playing a
unique role��
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