I sometimes wonder why I should try. What purpose is there? I wake up. I eat food. I shower. I clothe myself. Then I leave the house.
"I love my work!" Shifting through stacks of books, checking for damage, sorting, placing, cleaning, repairing. Walking back and forth in predetermined paths, carrying piles and boxes and papers and rubber bands. Smiling and talking and repeating the same words over and over and over and over again. Clicking and checking, scanning and correcting. What. What is it that I am doing?
Yes. I've gone on this walk up the hill many times since, because the body remembers the pattern even as the world rescinds its offerings.
I return home. I eat and rest and work and then, eventually, I sleep. But, what am I? My body remembers but I have forgotten. Moving this way and that. Uncertain. Undirected. Confused and undead.
If a person experiences boredom while walking and has no tolerance for this state, he will move restlessly in fits and starts or go this way and that. (Han)
I have lived another day. And yet I haven't.
This is where my absurd condition crystallises. I trudge back down the hill, cheeseless, not deluded, not desperate, but conscious. Then I go up again.
How often am I awake? Actually awake? It does not seem often. Rarely am I conscious of futility. Often I am too desperate to notice. Desperate to get out of bed in time. To eat enough food to stave off headaches. To dissect every day into its hours and minutes and seconds to arrive on time. I do not question the why because the futility is the end I am running towards; my mind is too exhausted to look beyond it.
If late-modern achievement society has reduced us all to bare life, then it is not just people at the margins or in a state of exception—that is, the excluded—but all of us, without exception, who are homines sacri. That said, this bare life has the particularity of not being absolutely expendable; rather, it cannot be killed absolutely. It is undead, so to speak. Here the word sacer does not mean “accursed” but “holy.” Now bare, sheer life itself is holy, and so it must be preserved at any cost. (Han)
Nostalgia whispers that the cheese remains. It's not a belief, just the memory of hope in a world emptied of its promise.
Collapse. It always happens eventually. Eventually comes for me and I find myself dead. Then. Then is when I recall the whispers and see beyond. It takes falling from a mortal coil to see there are many. And to wonder: where do they go? When I am in the journey, am I going up? Am I going down? Am I going at all? Even if distance is being traversed, to where? To what?
I have tried to convert my summer guests—friends and relatives—to the belief that the rite is sacred because it outlasts meaning; they reacted with varying degrees of metaphysical commitment.
… I said we should now walk to the cheese farm not in expectation of cheese, but in lucid confrontation with its absence …
I cry. A puncture. I cry: why?
But what is the absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call still echoes in the human heart. (Camus)
A demand for answers. For what purpose am I struggling and trying? To what end am I learning and giving and loving and hurting? To whom am I speaking? What am I saying?
The human spirit craves a cheese that can gesture beyond itself; or else it can't feed anything but hunger.
My message. My art. The message of I and the art of the same?
No, I want it. That's what makes it absurd.
And then my "I" dies a little more. A small piece, and yet:
Less I means more world: "Now tiredness was my friend. I was back in the world again". (Han)
In those quiet moments when I die, I see life. Chaotic and beautiful. Ineffable and intimately familiar. An expression of nothing because no one spoke it, yet an expression more loaded than any I have ever uttered.
A crack in her worldview where cheese must be the answer rather than the question. She had touched the rind of the absurd.
I have traveled these parts on occasion, and yet I still have not found a path. Perhaps one day I will find one. Perhaps I won't. I would like to say I will continue wandering until a thread presents itself to my understanding, but I know that I all too often forget to stop. Or do not have the capacity to do so.
We don’t just accept it. We follow the contours of meaninglessness until they resemble a path.
Where it is I do not know.
I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unraveled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery. The sight of the One-Hundred-and-Ninety-Second Western Hall in the Moonlight made me see how ridiculous that is. The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of Itself. It is not the means to an end. (Clarke)
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus.
Clarke, Susanna. Piranesi.
Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society.
theartofmadeline
yousharknotpass
