The Green Room

I was made for jealousy. My brother, born two and a half years later, seemed perfect in every respect: he was happy, cute, blonde, and, most importantly, athletic, with the musculature and coordination of a superchimp. Meanwhile, I could barely walk across the room without tripping over my ankles. Gravity is how the universe expresses its love; but to the uncoordinated this love seems embarrassing, even compromising. We want to be free. And no matter what element we chose, my brother always seemed about 15% freer than I was.

The literature of envy is rich, probably because writers and artists, existing as they do in a world of limited attention, are so naturally competitive. Even Goethe, who sat on German writing like an elephant on a chandelier, said: “The root evil: everyone would like to be what he could be, and would like the rest to be nothing, indeed, not to be.” In other words, no matter how much our sense of our own excellence inflates, it will never be able to detach itself from the surrounding social ground and float free. The gigantic little brother of the world will always be there to remind you how assailable your success is, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Other national genii – that is, other artists who we now understand to be, not just greats, but actual founders, firsts – have been similarly preoccupied with the jealousy theme. In Alexander Pushkin’s mini-drama “Mozart and Salieri” (adapted into a play and, eventually, Milos Forman’s Pushkinian film “Amadeus”), Salieri lays out his reasons for murdering Mozart with a metaphysical tenacity reminiscent of the best Dostoyevskian criminal. “People say that there’s no justice on earth. Well there isn’t any in heaven either.” His complaint against Mozart, then, is that he manages to embody an injustice that somehow manages to feel both cosmic and personal. Life is not fair: more specifically, my life is not fair. Mozart’s self-assured reply to this is genial, even bland: “Genius never commits a crime.” So, by murdering Mozart, Salieri unwittingly proves his own mediocrity (in the play, though not in the movie, where he’s wheeled away cackling and triumphant: a Satan who has managed, finally, to correct God).


Salieri’s monologue is a room: a room that we all inhabit occasionally and sometimes get comfortable in, to the point that, even if we were shown a way out, we wouldn’t take it. I remember for example what it was like to “celebrate” my eighteenth birthday by going to the drive-in with my parents. There, in the back seat of our forest-green minivan, I stared up at the ceiling as the felt of the floor-mats pricked my neck. I had never felt more miserable in my entire life – and the reason I had never felt more miserable was that each laugh or shout that I heard outside my window seemed like it had been conceived, crafted, and carefully launched in a single-minded attempt convince me of my own worthlessness. I felt alone, in other words; but in one of envy’s great paradoxes, I also felt like the still center of a closed and airless circle that had been created and was now being maintained by every single person in the world other than myself. Had someone whispered in my ear, at that moment, that there was no justice in either earth or heaven, I would have known what they meant. Jealousy, like all the sins, makes the world feel completely personal. That it is not may point the way to that door, and inspire us with the desire to walk through it.

What is the opposite of envy? Humility doesn’t exactly get it: when I try to be humble about the people I envy, I usually just end up denigrating them through some more-inclusive means (“Well, in a hundred years we’ll both be dead! Take that!”). But perhaps the sense of proportion that humility depends on can be useful; for if being humble means abandoning the float-above-the-world mentality for one that accepts the deeply-rooted interdependency of life (and art), then can’t we point humility, like a sort of emotional firehose, at our own personal Mozarts? Rene Girard, a true genius of jealousy, said that envy’s biggest mistake is the way that it turns the envied into a sort of god: a creature, in other words, not like me. Whereas the truth is that even Mozart was human and therefore imperfect, sinning, and yes, even jealous. (the letters, journals and biographies of the Great Dead (now there was a band) are instructive reading on this: who was ever as jealous as a pantheon-level writer?)

It may seem paradoxical to suggest that admitting jealousy is a way to get over it; but when it comes to the city of the creative mind (meaning, every mind), paradoxes are like traffic circles: confusing, but essential. For those of us who want to make things, envy can be a useful kick in the ass; unfortunately, it can just as often be the kick that keeps kicking, and if I can’t sit down then how am I going to write? Christianity has been accused of infecting us all with teleology, meaning a view of things in which there is one best end point and a million other subservient steps leading up to it. This may be true. But isn’t there also a way to read the Bible as a longer, more detailed version of Robinson Crusoe – that is, as a vast meditation on making? God creates, and then each subsequent hero in the long line of heroes creates as well, or tries to; meanwhile, what we hold in our hands is a record of their successes and failures: a list of tried inventions. The challenge is to see it as more zoo than museum and more vibrant ecosystem than zoo. Like all great books, it wants to be used.


Harold Bloom would probably disagree, but for me, the teleological pyramid picture of writing is unhelpful - even paralyzing. The thought that out of all of us (all the thousands of us), only one will get to stand on the top wrung doesn't make me want to jump higher: it makes me want to crawl into my bed and die. Is this hesitancy to join the huge, envy-soaked agon of literary supremacy itself proof that I will never be a great or even good writer? To be completely honest, I don't know. But I DO know that, if I want to be any kind of writer at all, I simply cannot afford to think this way. Inherent in this is another paradox, and maybe a lie too: the tree, one of many, has to somehow find a way to subtract the chatter of its forest and create a sphere of sunlight and silence around it, in order to grow. Mozart, who was a man before he was a genius, knew how to do this. Salieri did not.