In her last post, “Possibility = Optimism + Resilience,” Jewel leaned on the research of neuroscience and positive psychology to intertwine resilience and optimism. In this post, I’ll extend her thesis by adding the tragic dimension of life.

Sobering Reality

On Sunday afternoon I spoke with a dear cousin of mine, who shared the news of two of her friends dying that very day. My cousin, a lawyer, then recounted that many judges in the Kings County Court system in Brooklyn had died also, as her friends did, from complications due to Covid-19.

News reports recounting the numbers of deaths related to coronavirus on a daily basis are sobering; for me, and perhaps for you, hearing the direct loss and sorrow of a family member pierces the heart and kicks the gut to the quick.

The uncertainty and loss of our moment makes the tragic dimension of life, which ultimately involves death, more palpable and real in a culture, such as ours in the U.S., that usually avoids confronting the inevitability of death.

However, there are traditions and forms of inheritance in America and the West that don’t deny the tragic. Memento Mori.

Here are a few, which we hope provide insight and perspective to better cope and transmute the pain into creativity and growth.

The Blues

Why is the blues the foundation of American jazz, gospel, r&b, country music, and rock? Some point to the basic nature of the form harmonically and the 12-bar structure, but I don’t think that’s it. I think it’s because the blues, which began as a unique expression by black American musicians in the South at the turn of the 20th century, express the universal suffering and search for meaning of the human condition.

The blues speak to us simultaneously of the tragic and comic aspects of the human condition, and they express a profound sense of life shared by many Negro Americans precisely because their lives have combined these modes. This has been the heritage of a people who for hundreds of years could not celebrate birth or dignify death, and whose need to live despite the dehumanizing pressures of slavery developed an endless capacity for laughing at their painful experiences.
—Ralph Ellison

The pain and suffering, the grief and anxiety, as displayed, for instance, on 60 Minutes Sunday night, through loss of jobs and the search for work, small farmers losing money and undergoing depression and suicide as big farms rake in Trump administration subsidies and spread the loot to their friends and family in big cities, and rural Texas towns and hospitals teetering on the edge of financial and health peril, are multiplied by millions of other similar stories globally.

This pandemic has magnified the tragic dimension of the blues exponentially.

Five Stages of Grief? Not Necessarily

While undergoing a crisis, trauma and grief don’t leave much room or time for the consolation of philosophy. But how about science? As quiet as its kept, crucial empirical research has shown that resilience after trauma is the norm rather than the exception.

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As revealed in The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss, when George Bonanno began studying bereavement, many mental health professionals believed in fixed phases of grieving such as the five-stage model popularized by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. This point of view argues that people must always express and work through grief. But Bonanno, a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University, discovered that resilience is the core response for most people who experience trauma.

Resilience is the ability of individuals exposed to highly disruptive events to maintain healthy psychological and physical functioning and the capacity for positive emotions.

Bonanno found that those who cope well during bereavement share these traits:

Behavioral flexibility, the ability to adjust to the shifting demands of different situations
Optimism, the thought and feeling that things will indeed get better
Confidence, an intense trust in one’s potential and abilities
Pragmatic coping, a resourceful repertoire of behaviors that decides when and where it’s appropriate to express certain feelings
Smiles and laughter, even if only momentarily

Taken together, the traits above exemplify what Ralph Ellison called a “tragi-comic” attitude and sensibility toward the pain to pleasure of the marvelous to terrible of human life. Another mode and matrix of coping and resilience is tragic optimism.

Tragic Optimism: Viktor Frankl

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Though the Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was victimized by vicious Nazis during the Holocaust, through finding meaning amid the horror and suffering he didn’t remain a victim. In fact, by leaving us the example and wisdom of his 20th century classic, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl became a heroic culture warrior of truth.

One of the many truths found in his story is tragic optimism. Added as a postscript to his book nearly 40 years after its 1946 publication, Frankl’s description of this idea contains wisdom extending from Greek Stoicism to the Yes! affirmation of life intoned by Molly Bloom at the conclusion James Joyce’s Ulysses.

To Frankl, tragic optimism means remaining optimistic despite what he called the tragic triad: pain, guilt, and death. “How is it possible to say yes to life in spite of all that,” he asked. “How can life retain its potential meaning in spite of its tragic aspects?”

After all, ‘saying yes to life in spite of everything,’… presupposes that life is potentially meaningful under any conditions, even those which are most miserable. And this in turn presupposes the human capacity to creatively turn life’s negative aspects into something positive or constructive. In other words, what matters is to make the best of any given situation. … hence the reason I speak of … an optimism in the face of tragedy and in view of the human potential which at its best always allows for: (1) turning suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment; (2) deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better; and (3) deriving from life’s transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action.
—Viktor E. Frankl

Taking responsible action as members of a democratic polity is one of the abiding concerns of writer Stanley Crouch, who writes about tragic optimism from another octave of insight.

Tragic Optimism: Stanley Crouch

In the 1980s, after graduating college, the provocative and challenging writing of my friend and colleague-in-letters Stanley Crouch introduced me to the illuminated ambrosia of Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison’s thought. For that alone, I’ll forever be grateful.

Yet his own extensions of what I call the Ellison-Murray Continuum are yet another basis for deep appreciation. Whereas Ellison riffed on the tragi-comic dimensions of American life and culture, Stanley syncopated Frankl’s psychological tragic optimism to a social and civic frame of the political.

In two masterpiece essays from his non-fiction oeuvre, “Blues to Be Constitutional” and “Blues to Be Redefined,” Stanley marries tragic optimism to a blues-tinged American character as found in the nation’s founding documents, especially the Constitution. In the same way we play the blues to get rid of the blues, Stanley explained in the first essay above, the “nature of our democracy allows us to remove the blues of government by using the government.”

Just as the blues is a music about human will and human frailty, the Constitution’s brilliance “is that it recognizes grand human possibility with the same clarity as it does human frailty.” Just as blues singers publicly admit their shortcomings, the social redemption through policy underlying the amendment process embraces the road to better through facing the gap between our stated ideals and the all-too-real enactments of power and privilege.

Of our flawed, visionary Founding Fathers, Stanley, in the second masterpiece essay mentioned above, writes:

Those men, because of their scorn for aristocratic privilege and because of their belief in the abilities of elected officials and those whom they represent, had insights into the nature of humanity as it makes itself felt in social terms. Their tragic sense was that we have to be able to reassert our ideals whenever the lower sides of humanity appear in the four forms I am sure bedevil all societies and economic structures—folly, corruption, mediocrity, and incompetence. Those lower sides have nothing to do with democracy itself; they are built, mysteriously, into the species. The naïve among us are those who assess democracy—or capitalism or both—by the shortcomings of humanity itself, while failing to recognize that our essential social vision, as expressed through out governmental structures, provides the latitude for us to perpetually redress those things we find lacking.
—Stanley Crouch

Coda

Our outchorus brings together our themes through the personal account of Lesley Stahl, who at the end of 60 Minutes revealed that she too was among the one million thus far diagnosed with Covid-19.

She suffered from pneumonia and other symptoms for two weeks before going to the hospital, where she was met by “an overworked, nearly overwhelmed staff. Everyone of them was kind and sympathetic, gentle and caring from the moment I arrived until the moment, days later, when I was wheeled out to a gauntlet of cheering medical workers. In the face of so much death, they celebrate their triumphs. This valiant army in scrubs and masks were not just doing a job, they were fulfilling a mission, answering the call.”

May we summon the courage to do the same, to fulfill the very values and qualities that make life worth living, in spite of the blues and tragedy of life.

P.S. After a long health battle, Stanley Crouch passed away on Sept. 16. May he Rest in Power.

The Blues and Tragic Optimism