Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [172]
I still have many dreams for my island. My greatest hope is to return it to what Polynesia used to be. Considering the many incursions from the outside world that it has had to endure to sustain itself, it’s remarkable how resilient Polynesian culture has been. It has been invaded repeatedly by alien cultures: the Spanish, English and French; missionaries, whalers, tourists, hucksters, human sharks; and now television, perhaps the most insidious influence of all. The pressures are enormous, and the Polynesians must face the reality that they are living in a technological age and that it will be impossible to go backward. Now there are television, satellite dishes, jet airplanes, insurance policies, bank accounts, cutthroat real estate promoters and assorted other highwaymen who want to exploit Tahitians down to their last buck.
If I have my way, Teti’aroa will remain forever a place that reminds Tahitians of who they are and what they were centuries ago—and what, I’m convinced, they still are today despite the missionaries and fast-buck artists, a place where they can recreate and procreate and find enjoyment without being exploited by outsiders. I would like the island to become a marine park with technological systems that can help provide its inhabitants with more food. Because the population is growing rapidly, they will have to find ways to increase the yield of their land and lagoons. If I can do this, it will give me more pleasure and satisfaction than any acting I have ever done.
60
I CAN DRAW no conclusions about my life because it is a continually evolving and unfolding process. I don’t know what is next. I am more surprised at how I turned out than I am about anything else. I don’t ever remember trying to be successful. It just happened. I was only trying to survive. Much like a newly fertilized egg, I look now at some of the things I have done in life with astonishment. Fifty years ago, at a party at my home, I climbed out the window of my apartment in New York and clung to a balustrade eleven stories above Seventy-second Street as a joke. I can’t imagine myself ever having done that. I have difficulty reconciling the boy I was then with the man I am now.
I suppose the story of my life is a search for love, but more than that, I have been looking for a way to repair myself from the damages I suffered early on and to define my obligations, if I had any, to myself and my species. Who am I? What should I do with my life? Though I haven’t found answers, it’s been a painful odyssey, dappled with moments of joy and laughter. In one of my letters from Shattuck, I told my parents, “In a play written by Sophocles … the Antigone, there are lines that say: ‘Let be the future: mind the present need and leave the rest to whom the rest concerns … present tasks claim our care: the ordering of the future rests where it should rest.’ These words written two thousand years ago are just as applicable today as they were then. It seems incomprehensible that through the fifteen thousand years since our species came into being, we have not evolved.”
At fifteen, I was already aware that we have learned little from our experiences, and that our proclivity is to leave the correction of wrongs and injustice to a future we are not accountable for. Yet I spent most of the next fifty-five years trying to do the opposite. Frustrated in my attempts to take care of my mother, I suppose that instead I tried to help Indians, blacks and Jews. I thought love, good intentions and positive action could alter injustice, prejudice, aggression and genocide. I was convinced that if I presented the facts—for example, show people a film that I made about starvation in India—they would be aroused and help me to alleviate that suffering. I felt a responsibility to create a better world, propelled by the certainty