One of my favourite DVDs, that I take out every now and again and shamelessly hum along to, is 'Once More With Feeling', the musical episode from the TV series Buffy, The Vampire Slayer.

As well as great show tunes, excellent production values, and wonderfully subtle character development, I love it because it superbly captures something archetypal about human nature. I enjoy Buffy’s world because, given that it is fantastical giddy nonsense, the emotional complexity of the characters rings true, and the mixture of hope and despair and doubt that infuses each relationship is delightfully downbeat. Its gritty existentialism and mythic resonance are reasons alone to watch it. Not to mention that it is, at times, very funny indeed.
But this isn’t a review of an old American kids’ TV show. I’m trying to describe something about life that therapists call narcissistic entitlement, that astrologers ascribe to Neptune’s symbolism, that Joss Whedon writes so eloquently into the character of Buffy, dragged kicking and screaming from heaven. (Or perhaps more accurately in her case, stylishly sulking and pouting.)
We live in a narcissistic world – so much in our culture is centred on the individual, and our belief that we have a right to have our desires met, to live the perfect life, to be loved and to have a great sex life and as many creative intelligent children as we want and a good job and a car and a juicer and a cappuccino-maker and a sense of uninterrupted happiness. Somehow our expectations of the beautiful life, raised higher and higher each day through the dark arts of the self-serving advertising industry, and the Disneyfied land of Hollywood make-believe, have left us impotent when we face real, frightening challenges, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. And, strange as it may sound, Disney and its “got to have a happy ending” ilk carry a big responsibility in this cultural shift.
Time was when children were brought up on really scary, macabre fairy tales; children would face dark and terrible things in their imagination, listening to those old stories and myths, mediated by the evidence that they were tucked up safely in bed, and those who were spinning those yarns must have survived to tell the tale. The wisdom imparted in this practice was relational, intuitive, unspoken, and would lay the bedrock to a mature belief that, in later life, all manner of things could be overcome. Apart from the wondrous Tim Burton, and indeed Joss Whedon for older children, who are honourable exceptions that prove the rule, children these days are brought up on a sugary diet of sentimental pap that renders them devoid of the imagination necessary to deal with hardship and grief and loss when they reach adulthood. As it invariably does, even if it is only when we face our own mortality, and that of our loved ones.
When faced with the extinction of our beautiful dream, when we are yanked out of heaven unwillingly, when we lose our innocence and our golden age suddenly ends, that’s when we need to grow up fast, to find the courage to go on living each day as it comes. That’s when our mettle is tested, when we need to find our own inner hero or heroine, and lose any self-pity, which only serves to paralyse, and stop wasting our energy on futile rages against the Fates’ cruel whims. The question, when we are faced with trauma, is not “Why me?” but “Why not me?” There is a wealth of wisdom in old spiritual teachings and mythologies to help us get through challenging times, to help us reframe our experience into something that can offer a way out of the labyrinth; but you would be hard pressed to find them in this culture.
We are not conditioned to feeling impotent in the west, we resent it, we are appalled by it; our identity is largely built on the fallacy that we are in control of our lives. Some people deal with this through a belief system that places responsibility for their lives externally, in a god or gods, or a higher power. All the evidence shows that those who have such a faith are better able to cope with life, and yet the certainty that religious faith offers is, all too often, corrupted by a self-serving scapegoating philosophy, the projection of evil on to the devil, the infidel, women, homosexuals, communists, Jews, Papists, Muslims, Gypsies, travellers, Romanians, (insert minority group here), in order to comfort ourselves narcissistically that we alone have virtue on our side, that we alone are good and holy and will reach the promised land.
So what are we to do, in this post-religious culture? Recently, I’ve been hearing the rage of paradise lost, the fury that our “entitlement” to the perfect life has been stolen, unfairly, from under our noses. This rage is the opposite of life-enhancing. It corrodes and damages relationships, sinks us into addictions, increases a sense of isolation, and blinds us to the riches we do have. Rage, and in particular when it is buried in depression, poisons the atmosphere, makes it impossible to breathe. As opposed to healthy anger, which serves to fuel us to fight the battle that needs to be fought, rage sucks the fuel out of our engines, until we stall in mid-air, and collapse into a panicky disempowering tail-spin. It seeds the self-loathing chip on the shoulder that so many people carry, sending out subtle “fuck you” signals to those that are closest to us. It’s dismally counterproductive.
Of course this rage resonates with me, as I’ve been humming those old tunes for a long time now. The torch-song of loneliness, delivered with drunken melodramatic pathos, with the subtext: I deserve a relationship, and I’m furious that I haven’t got one. The Brechtian chorus of poverty, an angsty little dirge: I deserve lots of money simply by being me, and I seethe with resentment that I’m broke and I have to work or beg for my money. The ballad of middle age, in minor key: I used to pull whenever I wanted to, and now I’m grey and invisible to the beautiful ones. The lament of mortality, when bodies break down and frighten us with the knowledge that all our days are numbered. Those Blues.