Two men sit in an empty diner, pleased with themselves. Both have just given up smoking and are exchanging the usual congratulations of the cured. On the table, forgotten by somebody, lies a pack of cigarettes. Tom Waits studies it for a while. Then he performs a small logical miracle.
„Now that I've quit, I can have one — because I've quit." He lights one with relish and passes the pack on; the man across from him, speechless a moment ago, gratefully helps himself. Two unrepentant saints of the moment, granting each other absolution.
None of this has much to do with cigarettes. The cigarette is only the prop. What it is about is a stance towards oneself — the art of being your own benevolent warden. In a subordinate clause, Waits says what entire libraries keep circling: that human beings function not despite their exceptions, but through them.
The finest proof came, of all people, from the most pedantic man in the history of philosophy. Immanuel Kant, otherwise no friend of letting things slide, wrote in 1784 the sentence one ought to hang above one's bed: "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." Whoever wants to plane human beings straight has already misunderstood them. The proverb holds the same insight in rougher hands — sometimes, as the Germans say, you simply have to let five be an even number.
Psychology later measured it in the laboratory. In 1863, Dostoevsky set his readers a small task: not to think of a white bear — and watched the damned animal trot through every head from then on. A hundred and twenty-five years later, the psychologist Daniel Wegner sat down with a bell and a few test subjects and proved it cleanly: what we strictly forbid ourselves returns more often and more loudly than anything we permit. The total No is what creates the very demon it means to banish. The small, granted exception disarms it. Viewed soberly, Waits' cigarette is applied cognitive science.
The rest is humour at one's own expense. Walt Whitman, confronted with his own contradiction, shrugged: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes." Groucho Marx resigned from his club by telegram — he refused to belong to any club that would have him as a member. And Saint Augustine was the first to utter the little prayer that already contains the whole of Waits' teaching: "Lord, grant me chastity — but not yet." All of them people who catch themselves cheating and then laugh about it heartily.
|
In German, Peter Rühmkorf gave the matter its sharpest form, almost in passing, in the middle of a poem: "By the way: those who never ruin themselves will never amount to anything." What is meant is not the ruin of the body, but the small, voluntary tear in one's own discipline. A life without leeway, without exception, without the one licensed flaw in the weave planes itself down into something flawless and perfectly uninteresting. |
The teaching, then, demands neither renunciation nor rigour — only the willingness to treat yourself a little more leniently than the tax office does. To lie a little crossways now and then. To sign your own permission slip once in a while. In the background of the diner, Hawaiian music plays through the entire conversation. Nobody knows why. It fits perfectly.
