I always have this sort of panic as the week advances toward Saturday. It’s my typical preparation for pouring my soul onto this sheet. I usually pull a card from Tonja Reichley and Dana McGarry’s Way of the Wild oracle deck to sort of affirm or inspire what I will write about this week. On Friday night, I pulled the Bealtaine card from the deck, which called for me to “allow your light to fully blossom. Ignite the passion within the beauty and possibility unfurling at this turning.” I got passion in spades, being the romanticist that I am. Yet, this card spoke to me about speaking directly to the passion I am caught up with at this moment, which is previous philosophical or existential questions that have really driven me in past periods of my life. This week the wacky guy in this photo with his “neoliberal hellscape” and Mizmor “Cairn” t-shirt will take you back in time to a time when simpler questions about what one is to do given an inevitable death were of primary importance to him.
I really have never been the sort of person who enjoys numbers or quantifying reality. I came to it as a sort of survival skill after my mom died. There was a moment a few months after she died where I knew I just had to let my dream of becoming a sociological theorist like my advisor Vinnie Roscigno, Max Weber, or Michel Foucault die. SO, I did a 360 turn in my dissertation, abandoning a historical comparative study of the two very different responses that the Cherokee (Law and Diplomacy) and Seminole (Guerilla Warfare in the Florida Swamps) used to resist US imperialism in 1830s, and picked up a contemporary, numbers-focused dissertation topic. The resulting dissertation was still important in regards to its contribution to the wider literature, illustrating the important poverty reduction that various tribes had been able to achieve for American Indian folx through the casino gaming operations created in the last 40 years, but it was far from the place intellectually that I wanted to reside. Yet, it was necessary for me to take those steps in order to get a job with my PhD.
Ahh yes, the utterly absurd way that the bare necessities of survival thrust themselves upon you as you become more unhinged from the childlike wonder of your youth. I am sure you know it. I know that I know a lot about what I don’t want to know. And yet, here we are surrounded by the utter absurd machinations of capital and bureaucracy that churns on with a rather ratchet alacrity, like a robotic AI-greeter glitched into a cheery, stuttering “Welcome to WALLYWORD” message.
Unlike a portal to a limitless horizon, its like the equivalent of being thrown down a jetting-and-jutting, throwing-itself-to-and-froing drain pipe that winnows, winnows, and winnows until all the is left of you is caricature of what you once thought the possibilities of being a human are. It’s like the sonic equivalent of being thrown into the tumult of Aphex Twin’s Mt. Saint Michel in all its complexity and speed, with a complete lack of control of where your destiny will take you. And where are you left? Fighting, just fighting for a respite from the speed, the brokenness and all this rather pointless information that is pummeling the soft tissue of our brains at rates we didn’t even think were possible.
If I go back to the beginnings of what set me on this path, it was just about questions and ideas. It wasn’t about contributions to “the literature” or being seen in any way. It wasn’t about wielding an analytical toolkit to learn how to win struggles for equality. It was just pure questions. The sort of essential questions that all folx have about this incredible mystery tour that we find ourselves on. They weren’t questions guided by any one ideology or religion. No, they were the sort of what, where, why questions that we all have, but some choose to give airplay to more than others. You know those questions that can drive you mad if you focus too much on them. Yes, I am talking about the “why are we even here?” question and the “What are we to do with ourselves given that we face an inevitable date with death at some later unknown time?” question.
Have you flirted with airing out those questions lately? I sure have been. I can’t think of a better clean slate to return to after some 15 years in the wilderness of being trained to be a sociologist, being paid to answer other people’s questions in various bureaucracies, and trying to find my place in the cosmos without my mother. That impulse of slipping back in time to an earlier iteration of yourself before the world threw you this way and that, prompting you to winnow, winnow, and winnow yourself into this readily-decipherable economic unit. Yes, I want to restore that E X P A N S E that I found myself in on the edge of the rest of my life at 18 years old just standing slack jawed at all that was possible and how little I knew. I want to find myself open to new ways of questioning the person that I have become so that I may continue to grow in ways that I find in alignment with my values.
Camus has been particularly helpful of late in circling back to these essential questions. Camus was a guy who kept his eyes on these seemingly simple matters of life and death with an incredible fortitude, opening his philosophical text “The Myth of Sisyphus,” with the following line:
“There is but one serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”
I think most of our writing about what it means to be here in this animate meatsack at any given time has an origin point in these sort of questions about life and death. Well, at least for me, someone scarred by the horrors of death and grief and entranced by the joys of love, I find this an essential orienting question for myself. I can certainly go off into side tangents of what it means to perceive things and the limits of space time as passing fancies, but I must always return to the simple, directness with which Camus approached philosophical inquiry. Yes, I must return to the simple question of what it is I will do until the day I die.
If Camus were alive today, I feel like he would be in a genre-defying doom metal band. I don’t think it would be the straight-forward finnish funeral doom that Edgar Allen Poe would have embraced, chanting Nevermore, Nevermore, Nevermore over some organ dirges with a wall of sound behind him. No, Camus’s band would have been akin to Mizmor’s “Cairn,” where we find a the sonic expression of the futility of searching for meaning amidst the inevitability of death and absurdity of life. As Mizmor notes in perfect Camus fashion in his lyrics for “Desert of Absurdity:”
”The desert of absurdity, its brilliance revolting
Compels me to accept my lot
Ceaseless mining - we scour for meaning
A world devoid of purpose and truth
Thus awakes the absurd, its dissonance engulfs me”
Camus’ band would also have been happy to lose themselves in 10-30 minute swells of sound just out there experiencing the unadorned feeling of what it meant to be alive.
All this Camus talk may surprise you, dear reader, as you might think that one would be much more prone to nihilism and naked self-interest when reading Camus than the sort of romanticist, collectivism that marks my own values I share here. Yet, with my recent reading of Camus’ The Stranger, I found much more harmonization with my own worldview than I thought I would. First, I think that Camus’ depiction of the absurd in The Stranger very much aligns with my own experiences in the world. Early in the Stranger, Camus’ main character Meursault has a discussion with his boss where he is offered a promotion to lead a new branch of the company he works for in Paris:
“I said yes but that really it was all the same to me. Then he asked me if I wasn’t interested in a change of life. I said that people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn’t dissatisfied with mine here at all. He looked upset and told me that I never gave him a straight answer, that I had no ambition, and that that was disastrous in business. So I went back to work. I would rather not have upset him, but I couldn’t see any reason to change my life. Looking back, I wasn’t unhappy. When I was a student, I had lots of ambitions like that. But when I had to give up my studies, I learned very quickly that none of it really mattered.” Camus “The Stranger,” pg 41.
This excerpt perfect displays how Meursault is a stranger, or as Sartre referred to him in his assessment of Camus’ novel an “outsider” to the normal operation of work. He saw no need to play by the common set of rules that his boss thought they were both playing by. No, Meursault was outside that game, because he saw all jobs as indistinguishable, given the inability to find any capital-T Truth in a life that would inevitably end in death.
I find so much resonance in this depiction of a workplace drama that could just as easily be plucked from our late stage capitalist society today. We still find ourselves in a constant pull to exhibit the supposed capitalist virtue of ambition, even if we know all too well that “none of it really matters.” I know I find little to no meaning to my labor any more. Like Meursault, I find no need to be promoted or exhibit any ambition to move outside the friendly confines of the tasks that I am given to complete each week. I have no interest in having my name on something or supervising others like a tiny tyrant in a fake kingdom. In this embrace of the absurdity and meaninglessness of contemporary work, I am constantly trying to practice “letting go of the rope,” as my therapist terms it, where I practice my job as a set of tasks that is no different than any other job that comes with its own set of tasks. By letting go of the rope, I, like Meursault, ceding as little emotional, mental, and physical energy to the absurd condition of the 21st century workplace and storing it away for my own uses in experiencing the day-to-day reality that surrounds me.
I also find the silence in The Stranger something that I could aspire too as well. I agree with Sartre that Camus “in The Stranger, has attempted to be silent” by deciding to describe “the unthinkable and disorderly succession of present instants” as clear images of “present moments” that stack one on top of the other.1 In this approach, Sartre noted that in this text we jump from world to world, experience to experience in each new sentence, watching along as Camus builds a world in a sentence only to destroy it a moment later and erect a new one.2 This entire narrative structure moves away from any philosophizing or moralizing that one may find in what Sartre called “the universe of discourse.” No, it is a text that follows from Camus’ belief that:
“A person's virility lies more in what they keep to themselves than in what they say.”3
As a recovering academic and person who is forced to waste so much energy in the trenches of discourse where every text must scream of some larger universal order, the pocket of silence I find in The Stranger is a safe haven. Yes, these 120 pages show how one might retain some semblance of silence in a world that is constantly overturning every rock, searching through every dumpster in search of the Truth that will bring all the disparate experiences of a human life into some greater unity or harmony. I find my strength to continue on resisting, parenting, and creating by not ceding my energy to those realms of the absurd.
Instead of embracing all that hullabaloo, I want to be like Meursault on his lazy Sunday. Yes, this whole scene was designed by Camus to disquiet the audience by showing how distant his main character was from notions of family and grief after burying his mother. However, just watching Meursault sit around his apartment all day smoking, eating chocolate, watching the main street change moment by moment, and, ultimately, making dinner, provides an exemplar of how one can live outside of discourse and constantly searching for meaning. Yes, I, too, want to just exist in the silence of every emerging, bubbling up of an instance of reality that I traverse to from across a void from that previous moment which exhausted itself. That sounds quite appealing right now, especially considering I have noted that as something I would like to embrace in my recent essay Silence and Privacy.
Thanks for being here, dear reader. As always, I so appreciate your time and attention. If you feel so inclined, consider signing up for a free or paid subscription to support this project. Paid subscriptions are $5 dollars a month or discounted to $50 for a full year. All paid and free support is greatly appreciated.
All my best to you and yours,
James
Sarte, Jean-Paul, An Explication of the Stranger.
Ibid. Specifically, this very beautiful passage from Sarte: “We are now in a better position to understand the form of his narrative. Each sentence is a present instant, but not an indecisive one that spreads like a stain to the following one. The sentence is sharp, distinct, and self-contained. It is separated by a void from the following one, just as Descartes’s instant is separated from the one that follows it. The world is destroyed and reborn from sentence to sentence. When the word makes its appearance it is a creation ex nihilo. The sentences in The Stranger are islands. We bounce from sentence to sentence, from void to void. It was in order to emphasize the isolation of each sentence unit that Camus chose to tell his story in the present perfect tense.”
Adjusted from universal he to gender neutral language. Quoted from Sarte, Jean-Paul, An Explication of the Stranger. Originally appeared in Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus.