What Is the Color of Defiance?

Have you ever experienced a mental somersault? The kind cerebral gymnastics that leaves you wondering afterward, ‘what just happened’? Well, I had one today, a juxtaposition between two very different thoughts being coupled together by some hidden associations in my my mind that makes absolutely no logical sense….and that’s the beauty of it all.

But first allow me to set this up.

A few years ago, I finished a book by Victor Frankl titled “Man’s Search for Meaning.” During its very first chapter, Frankl detailed his three tortuous years spent at several German concentration camps during WWII, vividly describing horrors that my mind cannot begin to grapple with. Yet what made his story singularly unique was his training as a Psychiatrist prior to his imprisonment, which meant that his time spent in the various camps gave him a unique window into the psychological violence experienced by the prisoners he encountered, as well as his own.

There, Frankl was forced to witness the inevitable slide into despair that each prisoner gave way to as they were all systematically stripped of their dignity, before ultimately being stripped of their sense humanity as well. Life for those men and women became a cruel competition for survival, as each clung perilously close to death on a daily basis, not knowing whether their death would come through starvation, disease, or at the brutal hands of the Guards. The margin between tenaciously hanging on to life with your last bit of strength or letting the nightmare end by fading away into exhaustion must have been as thin as vapor. Staying alive meant doing whatever was necessary to survive, and if that was at the expense of the man next to you, so be it. Innocence ran like hell.

At several points during my immersion into his story, I instinctively recalled a line from a favorite author, Tom Robins, which at least on the surface answers the dilemma faced by Frankl and the others.

“…hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic”.

The line refers to the importance of holding onto our innocence, regardless of what life may throw at you. Well, as poetic and necessary as that sentiment may be, and as much as I agree in theory, it doesn’t belong next to Frankl’s experience. The emotional landscape he lived through had no energy to waste on such flowery thoughts. Whatever framework life may have once held for those prisoners became meaningless the moment they each stepped off the transport trains and were herded into lines where they were sent either to their immediate death or were perhaps saved to be used as slave labor. After seeing the walking skeletons dressed in rags loitering around the camp, I can only image that ‘survival’ no longer held much meaning for the living.

I had first heard of Frankl from reading a book by Robert Fulghum titled “Word’s I Wish I Wrote”, a book that Fulghum put together to honor the writers that had influenced him over the years, and in it, I discovered the quote below from Frankl that distills the essence of our humanity and dropped me to my knees the moment I first read it. Frankl wrote;

“We who lived in the concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, (the freedom) to choose one’s own way.”

Who can truly contemplate that revelation, fully understanding the depth at which Frankl experienced it, and not squirm in their seat at its imposition.  It’s the same question that many other moments in history demands of us an honest assessment……of what strength we ourselves carry inside? In other words, “How would I measure up?” How would my character respond to that level of inhuman treatment firsthand? Putting bravado aside, I have no idea…and I’m quite comfortable not to linger over the question for long.

Yet as powerful as Viktor Frankl’s survival story is, I don’t want to center this on him, or the death camps. What I held onto from his quote was an unspoken tenacity to say yes to life, even when life meant suffering.

***

Now to circle back to the mental gymnastics mentioned at the outset, let me explain the reason this is so prominently on my mind. It occurred while watching television this evening when I caught a commercial (by Panasonic) whose theme consisted of defining the colors of different emotions, such as “What is the color of mystery”? “What is the color of Bravado”? And “What is the color of Passion”? Well, when the last example came on screen it showed an over-head view of a funeral wake, as a small group of people walked solemnly behind a hearse, with everyone mourning and dressed in funeral appropriate black attire. The narrator then asked the question, “What is the color of Defiance?”

The camera then zoomed down to show a young woman walking among the group of mourners, but something was very different about her. She was wearing large stylish sunglasses and a long black coat, but underneath she ‘defiantly’ wore a bright red dress. Then the camera zoomed in to show a close-up of her expression and it was one of cool resolve, with an unmistakable smile barely visible at the corners of her mouth.

Now different people will walk away with different associations, but for me, with the context of “defiance” just stated, the symbolism was immediate and unmistakable; the red dress was her armor and her expression a sword that informed Death that she was not intimidated.

In a flash, my mind linked back to Frankl’s quote and the power of a life lived defiantly in the face of death, divorce, illness, debt, or whatever may have us on our knees. It’s bizarre I know, to link a red dress to a death camp revelation, but that seems to be how my mind is wired. And to put an exclamation point to this mental somersault, another quote quickly bubbled up as I attempted to make sense this absurd connection. This one comes from the Existentialist philosopher, Albert Camus.

“Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest, whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer.”

That sums it all up for me. Everyone must answer that bedrock question for themselves, and with Frankl’s story still in view, there is no room allowed for a cavalier response. Life demands an honest and committed answer, because the quality of our reply will be staring at us each morning in the mirror.

In my own painfully quiet, uneventful life, which might as well as been lived on another planet than Frankl’s, I have nonetheless found myself on a few occasions in some dark, unforgiving places where I struggled to hold on. It was during those moments, with my spirit bruised and bloodied, that I struggled to hold onto my own “divine blush”, but much to my amazement, I found there was something within me that refused to blink.

“In the midst of winter, I found there was within me an invincible summer”

– Albert Camus