Mapping Absurdity

 Entry 1    9:10 a.m.

He had bought a large map representing the sea,

   Without the least vestige of land:

And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be

   A map they could all understand.

    -Lewis Carroll, "The Hunting of the Snark"

Absurdity. Futility. The inexorable need to make a mark. The inescapable fact of death. I run to philosophy when I am lost, hoping it will provide me with a path to follow. Hardship, disappointment, loss, we all face these things. I believe, like Camus, that if we embrace the absurdity of our condition, we can find a purpose in a life devoid of meaning, in an unregarding universe. The contracts I negotiate today will be replaced when I have left, and will go on being replaced and forgotten long after I am gone, until the world is drowned in the next diluvial event. If I can find acceptance in this impermanence, this markless life, I can shed the crushing malaise, that is always waiting, a hungry soul devouring wolf, just outside the door. 

When I think about Jenny's battle, or the battle anyone has with metastatic cancer, I have always considered such a thing futile. But, in a sense, that is an explicit rejection of the Absurdist notion of the world. As such, I admit I am wrong. Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill, as Camus noted, must be imagined grinning, for in this he beat death, his ultimate goal. That his liver is rendered each day, and that he wakes up knowing today, like the last, will be an exercise in futility and confronts it anyway, is absurd. All of life is like this. Really. So, it isn't brave or cowardly to commit suicide, but it is a renunciation of the idea that absurdity is the point. Mandela's, "The struggle is my life," makes the argument that this is the point to which we should adhere. We are all pushing rocks up hills endlessly, to no end, and will continue to do so until the rock crushes us, if we choose to live. This doesn't mean there is no point to life or that are no morals. Life is what you make it. That isn't to say we are the captain's of the ship, no more than Sisyphus could decide to stop rolling the rock up the hill.  But, to live, fully, we have to embrace the idea that pushing the rock uphill each day, only to see it roll back down, is the point. There is no point.  Once we understand that, at least for Camus, and I hope for me, we can embrace fully living under a thankless, unseen sky.

 That life is an absurdity doesn't justify harming others, or Nazism, or destroying the environment--it doesn't justify abandoning a moral life. Those moral constructs are real, but only insofar as we ascribe meaning to them, and adhere to them in the breach.  Which seems to be all we do these days. Instead, it means that knowing the pointlessness of it all, we should seize the day everyday, get as much out of it as we can, understanding that there is no point, embracing this fact and facing it in each moment.

This isn't to say that celebrating or enduring suffering is required. We aren't expected to be flagellants. To the contrary, there is no need for abject suffering. Ending your own life in such circumstances, like after treatment options have been exhausted for cancer, or when you are facing the last throes of ALS may make sense for a given person, and isn't a rejection of the embrace of the absurd. 

Let's review. There is no meaning in life save what we ascribe to it while we are here. Nevertheless, we do have an obligation to live a moral life, and to interrogate what that means every day. Some moral

Snark hunting.

obligations are easy to determine and most people follow them. Thou shalt not kill, for instance (with an exception for self-defense), which while stolen by Moses for his people, seems to be a universal and moral rule. Other boundaries are less clear, whether or not I like to admit it. Fidelity, honesty, trustworthiness, all things I believe are morals to aspire to, may not be the same for others, and others may not see how I define such behaviors as befitting the words used to describe them. However, when I think about my moral obligation or moral obligations in general, my starting place is the Hippocratic oath "First do no harm" should apply to all that we do. So, I live my life trying to meet that standard. How do you measure meaning? How do you, or do you, measure how to live a moral life?

Entry 2    3:45 p.m.

Jenny is in Yakima. Well, was. She is on her way home after seeing Lin's husband and then going to see Monica Lewinsky, who is out on tour. Do I think Bill Clinton is a pig? Yep. Do I have sympathy for 21 year old Monica Lewinsky? Yes. Is this tour a grift. Absolutely. 

Abby is at school. Then she goes to work. Jenny is stopping by Murray's house to meet Murray's sister, or so she says. Then, she will come home briefly--, and then leave for book club. She has lived her life at a frenetic pace like this for the last several years. It has picked up since diagnosis. However, even before she fell ill, she just was almost never home at night for several years. If I had to hazard a guess where our marriage went completely off the rails, we were already falling apart when she decided being home was not a place she wanted to be, and as she separated from the family, she made it possible to create a different life.  

Watching trash television, I came across Shirley Ann Lee's song, There's A Light, as an outro for the second episode of The Exorcist. I went to find the album on Amazon Prime music, only to discover the first song has someone using an electric sitar to play gospel blues.  Electric Sitar.  The production is as lo-fi as you can imagine, and its hard to hear her voice at times, but it is a fascinating piece of Americana. If you only listen to one song, your mistake, I think There's A Light is transcendent. I added it to my fall playlist, I like it so much.

My best boy.

Some great news. I switched health plans today, officially. The change begins January 1. I cannot wait.