Revolutionary Road is a film centered around the emotional state referred to in Buddhist literature as “lack.” Leonardo DiCaprio, working with Kate Winslet and director Sam Mendes, made Revolutionary Road as an homage to the novel of the same name by Richard Yates. Showing the same restraint the Coen brothers brought to the filming of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, the makers of Revolutionary Road get out of the way and let Yates’ text have it’s say. And, again like No Country, Revolutionary Road concludes in an enigmatic way that indicates the presence of a rich vein of meaning.

Set in the stratified social hierarchy of 1950s America, the story begins as Frank and April Wheeler move into a new home on Revolutionary Road in suburban Connecticut. Already the Wheelers are afflicted by a nameless malaise; behind the breezy, self-confidant banter, lack casts its corrosive shadow. Ready to seize the day, April pleads with her husband to move to Paris and pursue his literary calling. Frank agrees initially, then balks at the last minute, choosing instead to climb the corporate ladder at his firm, which is devoted to the selling of business machines. Cycling through episodes of rebellion and self denial, April spirals down until one day Frank arrives home to find medics out front and a pool of blood in the middle of his living room. On foot he races for the hospital, the camera tracking with him as he runs through the placid streets, arriving just in time to hear news of April’s death. We are given a glimpse of Frank  some months later sitting in mute incomprehension on a park bench in Manhattan where he has moved with his children. The film then veers off, returning to Revolutionary Road where the Wheeler’s realtor, Helen Giving (played by Kathy Bates), is showing their former home to a new pair of up-and-comers. Later that night, Helen gossips unmercifully about Frank and April to her husband Howard. The camera moves in slowly as Howard, a peripheral character up to now, reaches down and slowly turns the volume on his hearing aid down to zero. Through his eyes we watch as Helen’s lack-infused slander is slowly engulfed by the deep silence that underlies the false solidity of this world.

I happened to be reading David Loy’s A Buddhist History of the West when I saw Revolutionary Road and I realized that the novel’s central focus is the feeling of lack that Loy views as a defining feature of our collective life, the Rosetta Stone of Western history. You can think of lack as original sin if you want to be pre-modern about it; or you can adopt Marxist terminology and call it alienation; or free-floating anxiety if you’re a psycho-analytically inclined. In Loy’s view, this sense of lack is linked to our fundamental groundlessness in the world, and our inability to make peace with that groundlessness. Contact with other people only fuels the emotion. From the outside others seem so effortlessly rooted in the specific, so solid and grounded, that we fear we alone are deficient. For some the resultant feeling of lack is a nagging doubt, for others a consuming fire, but we all suffer from it to one degree or another, and our history of domination and social inequity can be viewed as an expression of lack.

Richard Yates

Richard Yates, the author of Revolutionary Road, was no stranger to suffering. The product of a broken home, Yates struggled all his life with alcoholism, isolation and marital difficulties. His burnished, understated realism delivers knowledge earned the hard way, breath by breath, face pressed hard into the rough surfaces of experience. A Yates sentence feels as though it has been dragged shining out of a crucible where each moment has been reduced to molten silver searing to the touch. If you want to understand lack and what to do with it, read Trungpa, Pima Chodron or Stephen Batchelor. If you want to experience it directly, read Revolutionary Road, or, if time is short, rent the movie.

The image of poor Frank Wheeler on his blind run toward the hospital came to my mind a month ago. Driving home from delivering my daughter to school I got a call from my wife. The results of the fine needle aspirant, she told me, indicated that the lump beneath her ear was malignant rather than benign. Blood pounding in my ears I drove fast along side routes through the burnished, sunlit world to get home faster. I felt as if a large hand had taken hold of a branch of my nervous system and given it a good strong yank. Neurons entangled during the twenty years we have shared experience with each other were being pulled apart emitting bursts and tiny screams of light. All my self-centered ambitions, my trespasses and infidelities large and small, my many imagined glories, shames and failings seemed to trail behind my speeding mini-van – the meaningless streamers and confetti of the ego. There is no safety for us in this world.

In such times I give thanks for the various awareness and asana practices that help me stay open and present in the face of fear and despair. I’m fortunate to live in a time and place where the fruit of the great Asian wisdom traditions are readily available, often in a pragmatic, practice-based form that has been distilled by capable Western-born teachers. In January, for example, I was listening to a series of pod casts the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Ken McLeod gave recently as he worked out a new translation of the Ganges Mahamudra. This is the song the great 11th century renunciate Tilopa delivered to the scholar Naropa after suitable period of instructional abuse. One section of McLeod’s presentation in particular had a powerful impact on me, and the sense of stability and peace has continued to unfold through the stressful weeks since Jenny’s cancer was diagnosed.

But I also give thanks for a tradition that is equally transformational in its dogged way, an awareness lineage so secret it remains unrecognized even by itself. I’m talking about the tradition of modern art and literature as it has unfolded in protest against our prevailing materialism since the end of the 18th century. While the Ganges Mahamudra has been a source of strength in crisis, for example, the story Errand by Raymond Carver has also been coming to mind. The most beautiful description of dying I can think of, Errand recounts the final moments of Anton Chekhov’s death at the age of forty-two of tuberculosis. Carver wrote the story while he himself was dying of lung cancer. Like nothing else I know Errand captures the sense presence and ease in the face of whatever is arising that is the aim of mahamudra practice. To stay open and entirely present, at ease, even as death approaches is to give life its proper due.

It would not be so difficult for me to compose a list of eighty-four literary and artistic masters to hang alongside the traditional depictions of the eighty-four Mahasiddahs of the tantric traditions. Kafka and Beckett would be on that list, no doubt. Proust and Joyce would be included. Duchamp and Van Gogh. Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, Milosz and Celan. Rilke, certainly. Juan Rulfo, Harold Pinter, Isaac Babel, Flannery O’Connor and Thomas Bernhard. Raymond Carver, Richard Yates…I could go on (and on) and so, probably, could you. It’s easy to forget how radical the Romantics were, Byron and Keats in England, Holderlin and Novalis in Germany – these artists were filling a gap that had opened in the West when the Industrial Age began. Bereft of a viable means of engaging with Being via religion we developed a new mode of making art, a mode oriented toward forging new paths to the open ground of experience. Confronting an essential vulnerability, these pioneers opened new doorways into Being. There we can find timelessness and joy, which are the experiences lack can open into if worked with correctly.

There are times when I believe this movement reached its conclusion in the 1970s with Burroughs, Warhol and Ashberry. Now, as this new mode of Being percolates out into the population (we’re all artists today), the role of art itself moves around again in the Classical direction. In a world full of YouTube-auteurs simple skill – craft – becomes again a relief. Be that as it may, I want to close with the image of Frank Wheeler on his park bench in Manhattan. Devastated by the sudden loss of the familiar emotional coordinates of his life, he is unable to recognize himself in the luminosity that surrounds him. What he needs at that moment is an eloquent and convincing bodhisatva …or at least a good novel to point out where to look, how to stay open.