#john cotter

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Albert Camus called the feeling of the absurd—the feeling, for example, that my ears might be dying for no real reason; that I didn’t cause this, or that few of us cause all the misfortune that befalls us, or particularly deserve it (nor would we particularly deserve reprieve; we don’t deserve each morning’s sunrise)—a sensation of “sin without God.” In Camus’s metaphysics, the only thing to do in the face of the absurd is to revolt: to look the absurd in the eye and to carry on, to insure the absurd does not break you.

“Hush,” she said, and she held the hush. Slam poetry, then thoroughly derided in academic circles, is about as close as our culture comes to the kind of half-chant epics Homer would have known, or that Parry and Lord found in the Serbo-Croatian folk songs of the 1930s. Done well, it can have the same effect—like the best music, it makes us complicit in its progress; like the best stories, it moves quick and bright. And we hush.