Light at the End of the Reality Tunnel
David R. Weissbard
Unitarian Universalist Church
Rockford, IL
November 15, 1998
facts
David Helfgott was born in Australia in 1948, the second child in a family of Polish Jewish immigrants. He demonstrated great talent on the piano as a child and teenager - essentially at the prodigy level - and won a number of piano competitions. He went to study piano at the Royal Music Academy in London at 18. While in London he did very well but eventually suffered a "nervous breakdown." He returned to Australia where he underwent treatment for many years. A superb movie was made about his life which has resulted in as resurgence of his career and world wide tours in which he has performed by packed houses.
This much we can say without fear of contradiction. Not much more.
Gillian's View
The film Shine won many well-deserved awards. It purports to be the true story of Helfgott's life - of how he endured incredible pressure from a cruel and abusive father, how he was disowned by his father and family when he went to England, how he disintegrated while in England as a result of his conflicted relationship with his father, how he was abused in mental hospitals for a decade, often prevented from touching a piano, how he stumbled into a piano bar and found a modicum of success, was introduced by the owner of the bar to a woman who became his wife and savior, and how he has now become one of the great pianists of our time. That is one way of looking at the story of David Helfgott.
Not surprisingly, that is the way his life is viewed by his wife Gillian, the heroine of the film who was played by Lynn Redgrave. His wife, in fact, has co-written a book, Love You to Bits and Pieces, which describes itself as "The true story that inspired the award-winning movie 'Shine.'"
The book adds, as books can, layers of detail to the screenplay. Gillian came into David's life late, but she speaks with authority about events in his childhood and adult life before she entered it, based on things he has told her in his own language, which is so unusual that there is a dictionary in the back of the book to translate it.
Peter Helfgott is depicted in the book and the film as a cruel petty tyrant who was determined to control every dimension of his son's life. David so impressed Isaac Stern on a tour in Australia, that the great musician invited him to come to the United States to study music. When "rich Jews" (who are cited repeatedly in the book with that phrase) and the local newspaper raised money for David's trip, his father made them give the money back because he would not see his control over his son diminished.
When David, at 18, secretly arranged with the "rich Jews" to go to England to study, his father beat him and told him that he no longer had a family. His father refused to even open letters and returned them stamped refused. After a triumphant performance of the Rachmaninoff 3rd Piano Concerto, David fell apart and ended up in a psychiatric hospital in England. He returned home to Australia and his father refused to see him. He was hospitalized for a decade about which little is known because the records are missing, but the implication is that he was drugged and subjected to countless electro-shock treatments.
The book, not the film, tells us that he did have a brief marriage from Hell with "the greatest bitch in the world." He was hospitalized again and was useless until he began playing at the piano bar, and was introduced by the owner to a friend - an astrologer who was somewhere around fifteen years older than David and was divorced with grown children. They fell in love and were married. She provided the loving care and concern that David had not known before, and his condition began to improve. He began to perform again.
An Australian movie producer saw a writeup in the Adelaide paper in 1986 during his "return tour" which quoted Gillian as describing her husband as "an absolutely unforgettable, irresistibly endearing, hopelessly impractical genius who does not know meanness or dishonesty." The article went on to say that "Mrs. Helfgott nurtures him like a rare flower, believing that 'fine performers need special care and support so they can blossom to full potential." The producer went to the concert and began a decade long effort to produce the film of David's remarkable return to life.
The film was beautifully done and justly became a hit. The Helfgotts have made millions in concert tours since the film and book were released. David is admittedly a little weird - he goes up to strangers and hugs and kisses them, his speech is quite bizarre, he sings his way through his performances -- no one would mistake him for normal, but we have no right to expect that of geniuses.
I began this sermon with that story because it is a wonderful introduction to the concept of "reality tunnels." It is a presentation of how Gillian Helfgott views her rescue of her husband from madness. It is consistent and coherent - as coherent as the story of madness can be, of course. It all hangs together because Gillian Helfgott is not mentally ill - just her husband.
Wilson's 'Reality Tunnels'
I made reference to "reality tunnels" in a sermon several years ago after I discovered Robert Anton Wilson's book, The New Inquisition. Some of you may recall the term "Sumbunall" he proposed as a corrective to what I termed our "illiberal liberalism." Rather than saying "All conservatives believe...." or "all popular music is. . . ." or "all men are . . ." he suggests that we say "Some, but not all ..."
Central to Wilson's understanding of the world is his belief that all of us construct realities with which we live - except that we assume that they are given - that they are "real" - rather than constructed. And so we make judgements about how the world works, and who other people are, and about who we are. The problem is that we live in what he calls "reality tunnels" which are focused in such a way as to exclude inputs and experiences that may challenge what we believe, that may help us see the errors in our limited or erroneous constructions of reality.
Wilson maintains that many people who claim to faithfully follow the scientific method do so unfaithfully - continually excluding evidence that does not fit within the parameters of their expectations.
Wilson says:
We make facts by organizing appearances into reality-tunnels that suit our present needs, our problems-to-be-solved, our fears and fantasies, and our prejudices.And just as the Fundamentalist Materialist classifies as "fact" that which fits its model, and dismisses as "mere appearance" that which does not fit, so, too, the Fundamentalist Thomist mechanically accepts that which fits the Thomist model. . . - and similar mechanisms perpetuate the Fundamentalist Samoan tiki-worship reality tunnel, and the Fundamentalist racist reality-tunnel, and the Fundamentalist male chauvinist reality-tunnel, and the Fundamentalist Ohio Presbyterian Republican reality-tunnel, and the Fundamentalist Iranian Islamic reality-tunnel . . .
And we should add, the Fundamentalist Unitarian Universalist Liberal reality tunnel.
Our culture has been based on the belief that the basic reality tunnel created by White European males over the past 300 years is the only "real" way to look at the world - what could Asians, Africans, women, Native Americans, possibly have to offer us? Including them in a course of study wastes time and dilutes our knowledge. "Our culture succeeded and theirs failed! What could we gain from them?"
Aho's View
I am fascinated by a book that Jim Spelman called to my attention: This Thing of Darkness : A Sociology of the Enemy by James Aho. Listen to Aho's orientation to reality:
...even a moment's reflection reveals that what I see as trash some other person might well see as food, what I experience as pleasure someone else may see as pain, what I call a duty may in reality be a choice; and thus the social institutions we commonly hold to be inexorable, necessary and unavoidable are in fact our own collective creations, hence not inevitable at all. In other words, human beings reside in worlds they themselves have fashioned. Our worlds are cultural "art-facts," not natural affairs. However we tend to forget this truth, attributing responsibility for our world to some other thing, event or Person independent of us: our genes, Fate, the Will of God, "the way I was raised," and so forth.
What Aho is talking about, in other words, is the reality tunnels we create and live in.
I thought for a while Aho was going to be poignantly relevant today because one of the examples he uses of our creation of enemies is Saddam Hussein. Consider this:
As difficult it is for us to hear them, Iraqi ravings about Western "imperialism," American "duplicity," and the "violations" of Muslim women and sanctuaries are in a pragmatic sense probably as realistic to Iraqis as is the following vcreed expressed so baldly by American officials and repeated like cant by the American public: Saddam is the "greatest peril" today to freedom, security, and the American way of life, a "ruthless tyrant" who has committed "outrageous acts of genocidal barbarism" that "surpass" even those of Hitler in their brutality.
That, friends, is a propaganda reality tunnel which is being used on us to unite us against a common foe, to distract us from our own problems. If you think about it outside of the popular reality tunnel, Saddam is right in saying that the American led sanctions are killing his people and there is no end to them in sight. To acknowledge this is not to say that Saddam is a "good guy," but as I suggested last year, we created him, we armed him, we backed him when he served our purposes. If you want to see reality tunnels, look at the headline of this morning's paper.
Levenson and 'Understanding'
Beyond those grand socially created reality tunnels are the individual ones we create to make sense of our own lives. Every individual has individual reality tunnels that are unique from every one else's. They are constructed from our own experiences.
One of the books I have found most influential on my thought over the years is one recommended to me by a therapist 25 years ago called The Fallacy of Understanding. In it, Edgar Levenson, with a perspective not unlike Wilson and Aho, maintains that we can never really understand another person - we try to fit their experience into our perception of what is real, but it is a Procrustean bed - we chop off parts that don't fit our perceptions and experiences. To say to someone else, "I understand you" is really a lie or a delusion. We can know what we know only in terms of our own experience and that is never universal.
What Wilson and Aho and Levenson are stressing, is something that I consider a central theme of my ministry, namely: seeking to make us more aware of the limits of our understanding, the limits imposed by our reality tunnels, the awareness that what we think we see objectively is always subjective at its core. It is only when we can see the greater truth beyond our limited versions of it, that we can be open to wisdom and relationship.
Political Reality Tunnels
Monday morning I sat in front of my TV watching on C-Span the testimony of constitutional scholars - liberal and conservative, debating the merits of impeachment of President Clinton. Their conclusions had so little in common that it was easy to label those with whom I disagreed as ideologues. It was obvious that they were trapped by a reality tunnel that muddled their minds. The problem was that some of what they said made sense. They were not fools - none of them. Their reality tunnels were no more confining than were the reality tunnels of those with whom I found myself agreeing. The difference was that I shared the reality tunnel of some and not of others. Where was the middle ground? None of the Representatives appeared able to go beyond their own partisan perspectives, any more than did the speakers. They did not disagree on facts, only on their interpretation, but what a gap, what a conflict that left. It was easier to divide them into good and bad than to wrestle with the conflict.
Personal Reality Tunnels
In a congregation I previously served, there was a woman whom I believe I have mentioned before. She had nine children. There was one who was giving her trouble and she told me she took him to twenty-some child psychiatrists until she found one who was willing to tell her what she wanted to hear - that her kid was mentally ill. That was before I got there.
After I became minister, there was another problem. She had an affair with another member of the church and decided that her husband no longer met her needs. She kicked him out of the house, and he was willing to go. Her affair fell through and she was alone. Her ex-husband ended up moving in with a divorced woman in the church. The ex-wife was furious. According to her reality tunnel, the divorcee, who had been a friend of hers, was betraying her, as was her ex-husband. He had no right to live with someone else and be happy while she was alone. She was indignant and wanted me to tell him how wrong he was. Her reality tunnel told her that it was not fair that she was lonely and he was not. The "victim" had become the perpetrator. I did not share her tunnel, even though I believed she was sincere in her belief. I declined to play the role in which she sought to cast me. She left the church because people were too accepting of what showed up in her reality tunnel as her husband's immorality.
Closer to Home
One of the things that Aho said particularly rang a bell for me personally. "My violation of you grows from my yearning to rectify the wrong I sense you have done me. Violence emerges from my quest for good and my experience of you as the opponent of good."
There are some good people whose reality tunnels see me as the "opponent of good" for this church. I continue to be cast by some as "the enemy," and I get mail and receive reports of rumors about how I am destroying this church. Everything I say and do is subject to interpretation by some people in the worst possible light in order to maintain their reality tunnel. It is also true that there are those who have constructed equally inaccurate reality tunnels in which my screw-ups are interpreted in the best possible light. It is not easy to live as either an enemy or a hero when you know neither shoe fits. And it takes considerable effort not to reciprocate by defining those who vilify me, as evil enemies.
The "Myth" of Shine? - Margaret's Tunnel
I began with the reality tunnel of Gillian Helfgott, one shared by the producer of Shine. Are you comfortable with and was your heart warmed by the inspiring story that the movie told? Perhaps you should not be.
There is an alternative reality tunnel which has been presented by Margaret Helfgott, David's sister. In her book, Out of Tune: David Helfgott and the Myth of Shine, it is Margaret's contention that the reality of David's story is far different from what Gillian presents.
Gillian never met David's father, Peter, who died six years before she came on the scene. According to Margaret, Peter was a devoted and caring father who never did any of the brutal things Gillian says David says he did. There was never the break in the family when David went to England - there is a stack of loving correspondence between David and his father throughout that period, although Gillian has legally blocked its publication. Yes, David's father did try to discourage his going to America and England, but according to Margaret, that was because there were clear signs that David was not capable of living on his own. There was schizophrenia in the family - Peter's aunt and sister were schizophrenic - and David was beginning to show some signs of malfunctioning. His father didn't believe David should go to England, but he did sign the documents that made it possible for him to go. His piano teacher thought him incapable of functioning on his own. David's teachers in England found his behavior erratic at best, but said that he always spoke fondly of his father.
When David returned to Australia, he, in fact, moved in with his family - they did not exclude him. He never gave up on his music for long, and continued to perform whenever he was well. There are reviews presented from the middle of what Gillian depicts as his dark period.
David's first wife, far from being a terrible bitch, was, according to his family, a loving woman under whose influence he blossomed and performed brilliantly. He put her through Hell and during one of his hospitalizations he fell in love with another patient and divorced her.
David had a subsequent long relationship with another woman during his time living in one of the most progressive and supportive out patient living centers in Australia. It is dubious that he ever was treated with electro-shock, and there is no evidence that he was kept in a doped up stupor for long periods of time as Gillian suggests.
Margaret reports that David's most bizarre behaviors - the stooped posture, the hugging of strangers, the strange language he uses -- all began only after he began living with Gillian.
His performances, according to Margaret, have deteriorated drastically since his relationship with Gillian began. While audiences give him standing ovations, the music critics universally pan him as being far below average. The Boston Globe, for instance, referred to his performance as "shapeless and utterly incoherent , . . . without form, harmonic understanding, differentiation of style, and often basic accuracy; worst of all, it was without emotional content." The critics are judging from reality tunnels far removed from the reality tunnels of the audiences that are cheering the performances.
Gillian and the film producer maintain that Margaret is in denial and trying to coverup to protect her father's memory, and anyhow, she has always been jealous of David.
Conflicting Tunnels
Gillian and Margaret occupy very different reality tunnels. They have written about the same life, but from very different perspectives. Each has constructed a reality tunnel out of her experience. It is my assumption that each is sincere in presenting the reality tunnel she has created - it is part of my reality tunnel that they could both be sincere. That is not to say both necessarily are - but I reserve judgement on that.
Some who bought into the movie version of the story have trouble letting go of it because they found it so affecting - they want to believe it. It could be true.
Shine may not be the best example of reality tunnels because there is likely to be a point where corroborating evidence could be weighed and one tunnel may be deemed more credible than the other. But on the other hand, it is likely that some people will never be convinced, whatever evidence is forthcoming. We will never really know. That's what reality tunnels are about.
One reporter maintains that Beverly Eley, a third author who had released a biography of David, withdrew it when she investigated further and is rewriting it on the basis that Gillian's version is a hoax that is "deeply disturbing and not quite honest." Time will tell how convincing she is.
A Complex World
The point of this sermon is one I have tried to make before, and probably will try to make for as long as I am in the ministry: the world in which we live is far more complex than we can comprehend. Most of the things we accept as true are only approximations of reality. We cope by simplifying, but by simplifying we distort. The hope we have is that we can learn to listen for the alarms that tell us when our reality tunnels are excluding information that we really need to process. The more determined we are that we must be right, the greater the likelihood that we are not. Whenever I address a controversial subject in a sermon, I spend a lot of my preparation time trying to understand the perspectives of those who see the subject differently.
Some people are afraid that understanding the relativity of truth leaves one unable to act or take responsibility. The fact that we never know the whole truth, and that those who see something differently may have some of the truth, does not mean that we should be immobilized. We have the responsibility for acknowledging our limitations and then going ahead to make the best decisions we can based on the best evidence we can admit to our reality tunnels.
The light at the end of our tunnels is based on the fact that we have the opportunity to keep the walls of our tunnels flexible, to engage in research on opposing views, to admit to the possibility of our errors, to engage in genuine dialogue with those with whom we disagree in order to explore the basis for our differences. If we create our tunnels, we also have the power to change them. As we affirm our limitations, we paradoxically expand our possibilities.