Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (49 page)

The next piece of the past comes in the form of a near automobile accident, involving Mr. and Mrs. Alman, who then join the group. They are soon expelled because of their vicious marital fighting, but their work has been done: we see a Strindbergian marriage as snake pit, and we will soon realize that it doubles for Borg’s own almost unmentioned marital past, a past that is about to come out of the casket where it’s been lodged all these years.

The next installment takes us to Borg’s aged mother, living alone with memorabilia of her (largely dead) children, cold as the grave, striking a kind of terror into Marianne, who now sees her husband, Evald, Borg’s son, as a lineal descendant of these living-dead people, as she informs Borg in her account of her pregnancy and her battle with Evald, who refuses to be pulled into life, who is waiting for the right moment for suicide. The pieces of the puzzle are falling into place: Bergman’s film is about death in life, about the failure to love. This is the obscene secret that makes a mockery of Borg’s honorary degree: he is the corpse of the nightmare, a guilty corpse, a corpse with, as it were, cadavers. He has denied love all his life. It’s a secret he’s not known about. The film sets out to change all that. The next dream/memory sequence has the old man talking again to the Sara of the past, who forces him to look into the mirror—that is what the entire film is about—and gives him the news: “You are a worried old man who will die soon.… I’m about to marry your brother, Sigfrid. He and I love each other.… Look at your face now. Try to smile!” This scene is almost unbearable to watch, for it consists of a young girl from the past telling an old man what happened in his life, how he either lost or failed love. He tells her, “It hurts.” She responds, “You, a professor emeritus, ought to know why it hurts. But you don’t. Because in spite of all your knowledge you don’t really know anything.”

All our advanced degrees, along with our material accomplishments, don’t mean zip when it comes to the essentials: Have you lived? Have you loved? If not, why? Why indeed? Isak Borg, en route to an honorary degree, is put through his paces, and the coup de grâce goes right to the vitals, as if the initial gentle, bittersweet prodding and exploration of his weaknesses had been just prep work, leading now to a full-scale assault. Famous doctor? Ha! Just another of the old man’s mirages. So Borg is to be examined as a medical student—old man though he is—and he is going to fail spectacularly. Put into the very lecture hall where he formerly taught and gave exams, the doctor is first asked to identify the bacteriological specimen in the microscope; he peers in, adjusts it, but finds nothing except his own eye staring back at him. Next he’s asked to read a text on the blackboard, but he can make nothing of it; the examiner (Mr. Alman, reappearing) explains that this text states the first duty of a doctor and inquires if Borg knows what that is. Borg thinks, thinks harder, and confesses that he’s forgotten. Alman obliges: “A doctor’s first duty is to ask for forgiveness.” He is then notified that he is “guilty of guilt.” What guilt? What forgiveness? We’ll soon see. But first he must pass the clinical test: to diagnose the woman wrapped in a hospital robe (Mrs. Alman, reappearing). Borg does so and pronounces her dead. She then stands up and laughs wildly. The exam is over; the grade is “incompetent.” Alman then adds that there are some further offenses, further accusations—made by Borg’s wife.

Wife? She’s been dead for years, the old man says. At which point the examiner leads him outside for his final trial. A long, slow seduction scene is now played out: the woman is Borg’s wife, the man is large and sensual, it is a mating ritual: each is panting, he closes in, she puts up a charade of denial, he brings her with increasing brutality to surrender, it closes with her collapsing, rolling over, as he holds her by the hair, makes her look at him, straddles her, and enters her. The examiner tells Borg (and us) that this is a scene from Tuesday, May 1, 1917, and that Borg witnessed exactly what has now transpired and that he can still recall it at any time. The postcoital part is the hardest to take. Now we see where Sara’s remarks about high-mindedness and purity were headed: the wife says she’ll confess to Isak, that he will say he pities her, that he forgives her, but that those words mean nothing “because he’s completely cold.” He’ll then be tender, even aroused, adding that he understands everything, that he’s to blame, “But he doesn’t care about anything because he’s completely cold.”

Borg asks what the punishment is. Alman answers: “Loneliness.” Failure everywhere: as doctor, as person. It would be hard to imagine a more severe rebuke to any view of old age as golden, old age as wisdom, old age as harvest. Instead Bergman is peeling away at the facade of Isak Borg, exposing him as a charlatan, an actor who’s heretofore won people over but whose exposure as a fraud is now out in the open. Again, what is most painful in these sequences is Borg’s stunned reaction. He has not known. He has not thought himself cold. In the midst of his humiliating trial, he begs Alman to spare him, saying “I have a bad heart. I’m an old man, Mr. Alman, and I must be treated with consideration.” Alman responds, “There’s nothing concerning your heart in my papers.” Much of the film’s richness is caught in this exchange. Bergman has succeeded in convincing us of two contradictory things at once: Borg is cold and alienated; Borg does have a heart and is suffering. Every viewer of the film is caught here as well. This man is more sinned against than sinning. And of course Bergman elects to ascend from this horrid moment of truth, to move toward warmth and love, so that the final part of the film exits the pit and shows us Isak Borg receiving his honorary degree and perhaps wiser than he was before. Marianne kisses him good night, and we feel that peace has been made: with her, with his son, with himself.

One reason I love this film is because of its lifelike ambivalence. All of us are susceptible to the scathing indictment inflicted on Isak Borg. All of us are, at some level, disguised, puffed up, and fraudulent. None of us has loved enough. But do we deserve crucifixion? The film closes in quasi-sentimental fashion, and one is entitled to feel that the warmth is merited. Isak Borg has had his trip into the mirror. He has confronted his ghosts, even to the tune of realizing that he himself is something of a living ghost. He has been spared nothing when it comes to the evasions and failures of his life. But he does not go under. There is uplift. Maybe it is not impossible to learn, to mend one’s ways, even when one is very, very old.

But the most disturbing feature of this film is its masochism, and I’d like to say a word about that in relation to its view of growing old. We watch old Isak being hurtled into times and places where he meets awful humiliation and pain. We watch him being turned inside out: famous, dignified, generous man of medicine exposed as a selfish, cold, love-denying corpse. Who would order such an exposé? My answer: oneself. I am not proposing that this film is actually an autocritique on Borg’s part. But I am saying that Bergman understands to perfection the radical doubt that, given time, plagues all striving and achieving. Bergman seems to me a connoisseur of the 3
A.M
. wake-up moment when you are covered in sweat and
know
that you’re a fraud, that you’ve fooled everyone except the fellow on the inside who is letting you know that he’s not been taken in. Here, perhaps, is the film’s truest dirty secret: none of us is “ague-proof”; none of us is free of the corrosions that set in with time; none of us can shut out the little voice that whispers, “I know you.” And nothing good is ever meant. Can an outsider ever possess the dirt on us that we ourselves know or imagine?
Corrosion:
time dismantles, time fouls, time takes apart. We spend our early lives building, building, but the later chapters are apt to recast what we think we’ve done by hollowing it out, exposing it as theater, bathing all in doubt. In this view each of us is slated, if we live long enough, to “ghost” our own lives.

Return, for a moment, to Isak Borg’s calvary: he is forced to drain the cup of miseries about his terrible marriage, but now seen as
his
failing much more than hers, a failing that stems from a disguised egoism that parades as understanding and acceptance while actually being coldness of heart. For this he watches—repeatedly, we are told, since his memory can produce this scene whenever it chooses—his wife copulate with her lover. Yes, it was a bad marriage, but it indicts him, not her: he was the toxin. But do not forget that this pièce de résistance was preceded by the gory spectacle of the honored doctor failing his medical test. Bergman has lined up two massive humilations for his old man, and for years I found the professional boomerang rather quaint and lightweight when contrasted to the vicious marital/sexual exposé. Seeing one’s wife fornicate with a lover (and then to blame it, persuasively, on oneself) ranks at the very top of my list of imagined punishments. Yet, in some gruesome sense, failing the medical test is worse than failing the marriage. I’m hardly saying that professional expertise trumps personal life; no, I’m arguing that the deep corrosive logic of old age is more perfectly displayed in the medical debacle. After all, Borg is not getting an honorary degree for having been a husband; it’s for having been a world-class doctor. And that is what Bergman has wanted to target. Hit the man in his professional competency rather than in the genitals, if you really want to hurt him.

One reason the assault on Bergman’s old doctor moves me is that my own experience confirms it. For years I believed that the repeated humiliations meted out in the dream sequences were over the top, but I have come to see them as all too accurate, indeed as a forbiddingly cogent assault on the very notion of “harvest” or “achievement.” At this juncture, the story I need to tell is my own. I am not the recipient of honorary degrees, but I hold a chaired professorship and I lecture routinely to large numbers of students who see me as authoritative and intact (in my field). But my dreams tell me otherwise, just as Borg’s dreams do. In those nighttime visits, the same humiliation awaits me over and over. I cannot find the lecture room. I arrive too late. Or I arrive there but cannot find my lecture notes. Or I open my lecture notes, but they are the wrong notes. Or I look at my lecture notes, and I cannot read them. In each of these scenarios, what I seem to do best is being systematically erased, undone, exposed as either fraud or mirage. Who could be sending these awful tidings to me except myself? Initially, I construed this as a form of masochism, but I now see it as the emerging truth of time and age: I spent my life acquiring and honing this skill, and it is precisely this skill that must now be dismantled, cashiered, taken away from me. Bergman points to the fiction of owning anything, including your own talents and expertise.

At the risk of seeming overindulgent, I want to include the latest installment of these dream wake-up calls of old age. In the dream I am somehow—more on this later—in a temple, where I am the speaker of honor, and it is very likely located in Memphis, where I grew up. My text, as I mull this over in the dream, is an ambitious account of Jesus’s parables and especially the figurative and metamorphic activity in them, giving us a powerful imaginative experience. But somehow I am missing the biblical references themselves, and I spot someone in the congregation—a young adult with his children—and ask for his assistance in locating my references. He is evasive, suggesting that they may not actually exist. Worse is yet to come. Gradually, it dawns on me that this talk on Jesus is perhaps not the ideal topic for a Jewish congregation—how could I not have thought of this earlier?—and I begin to worry, realizing I’m going to have to do some fancy footwork as I deliver the talk, making some crucial shifts and substitutions from Christian to Jewish motifs. I am increasingly nervous and anxious about this, but then I experience a ray of hope: my text itself is sufficiently polished and broad that it just might get past the suspicions and scrutiny of my audience anyway, especially if I deliver it with pizzazz. With this small sense of uptick, I open my briefcase—you can now see the trouble coming—to pull out the speech, but I find only other papers: an e-mail from my twin brother, notes from earlier lectures I’ve given on different topics, but nothing whatsoever on
this
talk. I am now in real distress, because I’m on the verge of being exposed as a fraud.

I wake up.

And I ponder: why am I dreaming of this awful exposé in a temple in Memphis? I know the answer. The prodigal son returns to Memphis so he can bomb. Admittedly, this is not exactly the fate of Isak Borg, but it is not all that far from it either. What do I learn from this? That you get away with nothing. Once again, time is the great unraveler, and it will take the complex figure on the loom that you’ve spent your life weaving—those threads are your life—and undo it, take it apart, destroy the pattern. You will be dismantled. “Dust to dust,” goes the old saying. But that is a mild punishment, somehow happening after consciousness is finished, after we’re in the earth, in comparison to the real-time psychic leveling and piecing apart that seem to be in store for us as we move into our later phase. The higher you build or climb, the further you fall. You are the architect of your debasement.

Since I am being anecdotal, I’ll go a little further, in a different direction. The nightmare of professional undoing shares the stage with the real-life threat of somatic undoing. I could have a stroke in midsentence. As is, I find myself coughing, clearing my throat, and doubtless displaying a host of other bodily ailments each time I stand up and hold forth to my students. Sometimes my voice goes. When it does, or when the students actually think it is not going to return, I cannot fail to notice a look of malaise and even slight panic on their faces, as if they sensed calamity in the wings and had no clue as to how they were supposed to respond to it. My throat has always cleared, my voice has always returned, but a day will perhaps come when it does not.

And when I personally confront similar distress, I too am at a loss. I saw a great actor whom I know and admire giving a speech and trying to overcome his Parkinson’s symptoms as he did so, and I found that I was covered in sweat and trembling. I saw a close colleague “lose it” when introducing a speaker, so that he stood there, groping for words, unable to make sense or to stop, and I found it unbearable. Doubtless the worst I’ve seen took place at Harvard in the mid-1960s when I was a graduate student taking a course from the famous American literature scholar Perry Miller: in the middle of a lecture, Miller had what must have been some kind of aphasic attack or stroke, so that his words became jumbled, scrambled, incoherent, as if they were borrowed tools now in mutiny, no longer domesticatable, and he could not complete his sentences, so finally he simply stumbled away from the lectern. And he did not return. Ever. (A junior colleague took over his course.)