Moral Ambiguity

A friend gave me a cut-out New Yorker article today (I am notoriously always six months behind on the New Yorker, largely because I live in a city without a subway) about Norah Ephron and the making of the film Julie and Julia. Really it was about Norah Ephron, who is fascinating and petite and a perfectionist and makes films that bear absolutely no relation to reality. The article, written by Ariel Levy (Female Chauvinist Pigs), went on and on about how when Norah Ephron enters a room, people like Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep want to die from the awareness of their own lack of coolness, but really, the subtext of the article should have been "Norah Ephron feels no guilt." This was the part that I was most intrigued by, anecdote after anecdote about Ephron's ability to brush herself off and move on and away from a range of cinematic failures, a husband who cheated on her while she was seven months pregnant, decisions that might have been less than ideal, keeping a photograph of a confident John Gotti coolly strutting out of a courthouse during his trial, looking unscrupulously composed, as an emblem to the importance of vivacity and maybe even hubris in the face of humiliation, on her desk, the way some people post up inspirational quotes to remind themselves of the way they ought to live.

What is it that allows Norah Ephron to turn away from her mistakes when most mere mortals like us, dwell on them?

It made me think about people who are painstakingly conscious of their carbon footprints, and how I am constantly girdled by my karmic footprint, the divine equivalent. Like people who try to offset their carbon footprints, I attempt to offset my karmic one. Like people who clock how many miles they are driving, or how much fuel the plane they are on is utilizing, I try and offset my karmic footprint in a variety of ways.

I come from a family of particularly karma-sensitive folk. My grandmother spent a lifetime giving things away. Sometimes this even bordered on the impractical or excessive. At 8, I watched her, at a temple, slip a glittery ring onto the finger of a girl my age, who was begging for money. My mother has always brought home orphaned and injured animals. Pigeons with broken wings and infected feet, kittens abandoned by their mother. She feeds raccons and squirels and sparrows. There is a story about my grandfather, who, upon arriving in Delhi in the aftermath of the Partition, returned a bag of rice to the store he had bought it from because he had found ants in it. We can give you a new bag, the storekeeper told him. No, it's not that, he said. He didn't want the ants in his bag of rice separated from their family members, who had been left behind at the store.

But people who are aware of their carbon footprint sometimes have to take planes to get places. And people who are aware of their karmic footprint know that they can't curl up into a ball, and live alone somewhere in the forest and shit into a hole and eat berries off a shrub, given a range of circumstances they have either chosen or by happenstance been borne into (I should note, though, that I've actually in a hypothetical way considered this, and not because I have some sort of affinity for the great outdoors, because sadly, I don't (although I'm not entirely opposed to cultivating that relationship)). Incidentally, a fortune-teller at a temple once read my palm and told me that I had spent lifetimes meditating in a forest and eating fallen fruit and I attempted to respond to his declaration with one of the various thoughts simultaneously popping up in my head at that moment ranging from (the quizzical) "Really, me?" to (the more defiant) "Yes. Really. Me." to (the more shameful) "Thank God that's done and I never have to do that again."

Incidentally, some time ago, I was in a situation where I knew I would have to cause some amount of pain, in the between-a-rock-and-a-hard-place sort of way, and I consulted a friend who has been a practicing Buddhist for 40 years about what I should do. I'm trying to minimize the amount of emotional damage that I know I am going to cause. And I've been putting off inflicting this damage. And it's a bad situation. And I don't know what to do. I've agonized about this, lost sleep, attempted in my practiced way, to metaphorically walk backwards and sweep as I go, to tidy up any bits of dirt and grime my life has left behind in this situation, I told him. I was exhausted from lack of sleep, from knowing that there was no way out but to break something and then live with the damage I had caused. My conscience is constucted like a voluptuous woman's pregnancy hips, intended to hold more than a comfortable bit of weight, and I know I will relive and relive and relive the guilt of this over and over and over again, I told him.

He shrugged. Some things are karmic, he said. It sounds like you're doing the best you can do. And that is the best you can do.

That's it? I said. That's the best you can offer me about this situation after 40 years of studying Buddhism? because really, I wasn't asking him about my situation and the minutae of my circumstances. I wasn't looking for an easy out, or a way to make myself feel better. To be honest, I had even crossed the line outside of the larger question of individual karmic retribution. I was asking him about the state of humankind. I was asking about how we as a people can be confronted with such situations and how we as a people can survive in a world where it is almost impossible to not inflict some sort of damage along the way. I was asking about the futility of choosing the path of less damage, something we do to people, to this Earth, to one another constantly. And that is if we're relatively conscious and self-aware people. I think you've spent a long time thinking about this, he said. I had. And I think you've spent a lifetime trying to metaphorically curl up and be so tiny that nothing you do has any real negative impact on anyone. This wasn't entirely true. It wasn't like I was vegan or a member of PETA or adopting kids from Zimbabwe or quitting my job and devoting my life to feeding the hungry. I made a point to tell him this. He shook his head. You're human, he said, as though I had spent a lifetime attempting to ignore that fact. You can try and evade it, but you can't escape it. It wasn't about my guilt, I realized then. or about karmic retribution. It was about accepting the state of being human. And that's the maze there's really no way out of.

In a college philosophy seminar, I heard a story about Nietzsche - that immediately preceding his mental breakdown, he observed a horse being whipped by a man in the streets of Turin. Apparently, he ran to the animal, threw his arms around it and then collapsed. The question that was posed in my class was whether he did this out of pity for the horse, or out of pity for himself, and for humankind.