Different authors took the existential line of thought in many directions, but as Camus pointed out, they did tend to justify the absurdity of life with some sort of claim to the eternal. Kierkegaard was probably the only philosopher connected to Existentialism who ever defaulted to a purely religious conclusion. But still, one can’t help but wonder how someone could pick apart all the layers, witness pure existence in its true form, and then justify it by concluding that there’s something that exists above and beyond our immediate life. You’ll recall that even Steppenwolf‘s Hermine says all true actions live on in eternity.

This is what bothered Camus, and I think it’s why he wrote The Myth of Sisyphus. As I said in the last post, it’s a very subtle change in outlook between the Existentialists and Camus’s Absurdism — but it is a change nonetheless. The Existentialists (as I’ve come to know them) were remarkably skilled at describing the “nausea” brought on by life, but they were terrible at suggesting what to do about it. Those with suicidal tendencies before their existential investigation were often left with even greater death-bound impulses. In short, Existentialists sought a way to live in spite of the absurd, while Camus, on the other hand, chose to live for the absurd.

“Living is keeping the absurd alive. […] One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity. […] It may be thought that suicide follows revolt – but wrongly. […] Suicide, like the leap, is acceptance at its extreme. […] That revolt gives life its value. Spread out over the whole length of a life, it restores its majesty to that life.” (pp. 54-55).

Those familiar with my rants may be thinking of Henry Miller. Back in March I wrote two posts (on Mar 11 and Mar 21) about Miller and George Orwell, after reading that Orwell had criticized Miller’s style of “protest.” To sum it up, Orwell’s style was to attack the governments that had swung too closely to totalitarianism. Miller’s style was more of a protest against all of existence — hence why I think it fits in with Camus’s suggestions.

I’ve only read three of his books, but it’s clear to me that Miller experienced more happiness in his life than most of my favorite writers. That’s just one of the reasons why he’s an enigma, why I can’t cross his name off and keep moving down the list…so to speak. Camus and Miller both understood that, though the absurd does seem to negate our natural tendencies in life, it in no way prevents us from adapting to its conditions. Human beings are the most adaptable creatures on this planet! And our imagination is more powerful than any other tool we possess!

Those who have come this far in the struggle are often compelled to write about it. I know not what drives a man to write — even looking at myself. I know I was bored, depressed, unsuccessful, lonely, etc…and I was deeply inspired by the personal fiction of Jack Kerouac. But at the time, it just seemed like something that would be a worthwhile activity even if nothing came of it. Even if I didn’t get paid for it or become famous because of it, writing seemed like a purposeful way to spend my time. Now three years have gone by and — after an arduous process of self-realization — I still feel essentially the same.

In the concluding section of Sisyphus, Camus suggests that a life of absurd creation is, without a doubt, a life worth living:

“He must give the void its colors. [...] A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape. Likewise, a man’s sole creation is strengthened in its successive and multiple aspects: his works. […] A succession of works can be but a series of approximations of the same thought. […] But if those failures all have the same resonance, the creator has managed to repeat the image of his own condition, to make the air echo with the sterile secret he posesses” (pp. 114-115).

“The great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality” (p. 115).

“In that daily effort in which intelligence and passion mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths. […] To create is likewise to give a shape to one’s own fate. […] There is no frontier between being and appearing. […] The final effort for these related minds, creator or conqueror, is to manage to free themselves also from their undertakings” (p. 117).

But you see that creation is of utmost importance. To continue to create is a man’s way of revolting against the demanding and often unrewarding nature of creative activity. In other words, hardly anyone will ever become famous for writing. Most who realize this after hoping for fame will stop writing. Those who continue do so in an absurd fashion, because it will appear to bystanders that the writer is wasting his time. The absurd creator disagrees:

“He knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life…in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. […] The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (pp. 122-123).

After two posts I still haven’t explained the myth itself. Sisyphus is a character sentenced by the gods to the underworld where he must roll a heavy rock up a mountain, whereupon it just rolls back down. This would drive most to despair (if not insanity), but Sisyphus is clever. His victory lies in his continued activity, which he performs without hoping that it will end. By simply pressing on, he revolts against the gods who devised this terrible state of existence. Camus said he prefers to think about the calm moment when Sisyphus reaches the top of the mountain — when he can take a deep breath, survey the land around him, and then stroll leisurely down the slope again.

But don’t be mistaken. Camus provides no manual, nor could there ever be one. Every man troubled by existence must imagine his own happiness. I haven’t quite accomplished it yet, but I feel a lot better about the process than I did before. And with that said, I may be moving on to the next phase in this process of inner discovery. As always, you’re welcome to come along for the ride.

I can tell you right away that this will be a two-part analysis of Sisyphus, because I feel that I must provide an overview of the topic of suicide in literature and philosophy — at least how I’ve perceived it. Then there are two aspects to Sisyphus itself: an eloquent statement of the dilemma, and the closest thing to a solution that Camus — or anyone else, for that matter — has ever devised.

Camus discloses that the book was written in 1940, which I find extremely interesting, if only in terms of what came before and after it. Just scanning my favorites, Henry Miller published his first works in the ’30s — but Kerouac’s first book wasn’t published until 1950. Even earlier, Hesse’s Steppenwolf saw publication in Germany in 1927. I point these out initially because it seems that Sisyphus is a landmark in 20th Century philosophical development — yet in some ways it represents a transition that was never completed (I’ll expand on this later). By transition I mean that Camus essentially broke with the Existentialists of the ’40s and ’50s, most prominently Jean-Paul Sartre.

Camus and Sartre both recognized the absurd nature of life, but while Sartre and others sought to transcend it, Camus thought that required a leap beyond human certitude. As Camus put it, “I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone” (p. 40). Seen in this light, Sisyphus becomes a sort of poetic mathematical exercise in which Camus affirms the absurd life instead of evading it. And according to the Wikipedia page on Absurdism, this book is practically the manual.

Camus argues his case succinctly, acknowledging how deeply he could go into this subject, but at all times subjecting himself to a rigid set of guidelines. The main point of the book appears early: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy” (p. 3).

He attempts many definitions of the absurd condition:

“Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering” (pp. 5-6).

“What is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?” (p. 20)

“That struggle implies a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with despair), a continual rejection (which must not be confused with renunciation), and a conscious dissatisfaction (which must not be compared to immature unrest). […] A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it” (p. 31).

This blog is riddled with discussions of Existentialism and Absurdism. Two posts that come to mind focus on Sartre’s Nausea and Hesse’s Steppenwolf. But while Sartre’s Roquentin never really considers suicide, Hesse’s Harry is obsessed with the concept. He finds a “Treatise of the Steppenwolf” that explains:

“Suicides present themselves as those who are overtaken by the sense of guilt inherent in individuals, those souls that find the aim of life not in the perfecting and molding of the self, but in liberating themselves by going back to the mother, back to God, back to the all. Many of these natures are wholly incapable of ever having recourse to real suicide, because they have a profound consciousness of the sin of doing so. For us they are suicides nonetheless; for they see death and not life as the releaser” (p. 48).

“All suicides have the responsibility of fighting against the temptation of suicide. …It is nobler and finer to be conquered by life than to fall by one’s own hand” (p. 49)

But that’s it???!!! That’s all he could offer us? A sense of despair that drags one through life? Isn’t that just making oneself a prisoner of inertia, unable to improve upon any aspect of existence and thus resigning onself to it? Of course I should give Hesse more credit than this. Steppenwolf is a novel, not an autobiography or a philosophical essay. If you know the ending (I won’t spoil it!), it’s believable that Hesse was mocking Harry’s mode of living, even after the awakening inspired by the treatise and his wise lady friend Hermine. But even when more concrete suggestions arise, they’re often vague and difficult to adapt to the context of the 21st Century.

Plus, this book was published over a decade before Sisyphus. But that’s not to say that the literary community made a convincing progression beyond Harry’s position in the subsequent decades. The most prominent example is Jack Kerouac. He wasn’t a philosopher, but he remains one of the most beloved literary figures in American history. In his books he claimed that he could never commit suicide because he was a Catholic and that would mean he’d go to hell. His alternative? He basically drank himself to death. Big Sur outlines part of this irreversible decline.

Obviously the world of literature is very familiar with alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide, but Kerouac was always his own protagonist and thereby immortalized his story. And when examining this twisted path, it’s impossible to maintain a separation between philosophy and psychology. But this existential despair is an important characteristic of modern humanity, and one that cannot be ignored. In Steppenwolf, Hermine tries to calm Harry by saying, “The image of every true act, the strength of every true feeling, belongs to eternity just as much, even though no one knows of it or sees it or records it or hands it down to posterity. In eternity there is no posterity” (p. 153).

Camus recognized this tendency in existential thought, and he made a point of ruling that out of his possible conclusions in Sisyphus. “I am taking the liberty at this point of calling the existential attitude philosophical suicide. […] They always lay claim to the eternal, and it is solely in this that they take the leap” (p. 42). The “leap” mentioned here is applied to any bridge beyond what a human can comprehend. That more commonly means religion, so it was strange for me to see such a term applied to Existentialism, which I had previously seen as an answer of sorts.

In reality Existentialism is a statement of the problem; it’s where Camus begins and quickly dashes off. He’s not convinced by the idea of eternity, whether in organized religion or just broader spirituality. He’s not content to stubbornly hope that the basic condition of life will eventually improve.

Camus began to wonder if the desire to escape is an even bigger problem than the nausea inspired by existence. In other words, what if there was a way not only to endure the situation, but even capitalize off of it? It’s a very slight twist of the mirror that could produce an extraordinarily different outcome. “The danger…lies in the subtle instant that precedes the leap. Being able to remain on that dizzying crest – that is integrity and the rest is subterfuge” (p. 50).

Next I’ll explore what one is to do on that dizzying crest, and why and how Camus felt it could be accomplished.

In case it hasn’t made itself obvious through my blogging (and writing — or lack thereof — on Supraterranean.com), I’m going through something of a transition. I can’t express it fully at this time. At the very least, I write much less frequently than I have throughout the past two years. The reasons are plentiful. I don’t have any regular columns, freelancing, or other sorts of publishing relationships. At the moment, it’s all about Supraterranean…but that’s only one of those three “jobs,” and the other two don’t involve writing.

As David Gessner suggested in his New York Times Magazine essay (which I discussed here last fall), the reading life is the writing life. So I’m first trying to get back on my regular schedule of heavy reading, and hopefully the writing will flow on its own. Maybe part of my transition has to do with changes in why I write. I first started writing on a regular basis in January 2006 when I started a music blog on blogger.com. I wrote to pass the time and because it was fun. I was drunk on Kerouac and stuck in a big city that seemed to hate me as much as I hated it. I got through it by going to as many concerts as possible and using the written word to organize my listening habits.

The foremost point is that I wrote for the sake of writing. Any time I start doing otherwise, I catch myself and try to get back to that original motivation. That applies to inane journalistic assignments that require me to sacrifice my creative impulses for the sake of a maniacal editor, but it goes beyond that. I’m sure every writer hits a wall now and then. I don’t just mean “writer’s block” — there are also projects that refuse to be finished. Usually I don’t let it bother me. I think of it as planting seeds. If I sit down and write 1,000 words on pure impulse generated from vague ideas, sometimes I shelf it and come back to it later.

A notable example of this is my essay “A Healthy Contempt for Journalism,” which I published on Supraterranean.com in September 2008. I probably started writing that in January ’08, since the events discussed in the essay happened between Sept-Dec 2007. In other words, it took eight months to finish, but much of that time the project was totally inactive. In all truth, there was no way I could have written that whole essay in January ’08. I needed time to develop a broader perspective. I had to learn more about the journalism industry beyond my narrow experience with one internship and a year of grad school.

Finally a time came when the pieces seemed to start assembling themselves, and the rest of the essay was more fun to write. More importantly, I was happy with the final draft. That’s another reason to write: if both the process and the product are fulfilling to the author. If you hate the act of writing, or none of what you end up writing is pleasing or inspiring to you, then chances are you won’t be a writer for long.

Of course, there are many other reasons that people write. In the 20th Century, many people made careers out of writing. I suppose some people still do it, but with the fall of the newspaper industry (and the subsequent drop in freelancing opportunities) it’s becoming much more difficult. Really any kind of paper publishing is more difficult. And yet that’s how all literary classics were born, especially in the 1900s. No one had the means to self-publish. Some publishing company had to invest in an author for the author to be exposed to the public and gain an audience. There have always been multiple avenues, but that “needle in a haystack” method is what sticks out in my mind. I always think about Kerouac trying to sell On The Road to publishers for something like eight years, and then becoming the “King of the Beats” practically overnight.

And that’s another reason that some people may try to write, to achieve fame. It’s the whole rock ‘n’ roller mentality that swelled to monstrous proportions at the end of the 20th Century. It’s a seductive idea in writing, the hope that one’s efforts will eventually be affirmed on a grand scale, thus justifying all the tireless research, endless typing, awkward sleep schedules, and/or damaged personal relationships. Even if a writer tells himself that’s not why he’s writing, it’s another thing entirely to consistently write just for the sake of writing.

The great Hunter S. Thompson was even guilty in that regard. As he started to build his reputation in journalism, he once wrote to a friend that he was having trouble working on fiction. He said that inspiration was hard to come by without any promise or potential for payback. To me, that’s really sad, especially because The Rum Diary and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas are two of my favorite “fiction” books, and I wish there had been more of the same from Thompson.

So writing for money is a bad idea. Is writing for fame just as bad? That question will now (and probably forever) return me to a conversation in Steppenwolf (discussed here previously), when Hermine says to Harry:

“No, Steppenwolf, not fame. Has that any value? And do you think that all true and real men have been famous and known to posterity? [...] The image of every true act, the strength of every true feeling, belongs to eternity just as much, even though no one knows of it or sees it or records it or hands it down to posterity. In eternity there is no posterity” (pp. 152-153).

Those who know me well can see me striking through my main literary inspirations, and the only one left is Henry Miller. But I cannot disqualify neither Miller’s intentions nor his finished works. I’ve only read three of them so far — most recently Black Spring — but if he made one thing clear to me in the first three books, it was that he wrote for the sake of writing. I think Nietzsche would have called it (or did call it) feeding off of one’s own flame. (Wait, I’m confused — he said to consume yourself in your own flames.)

Before I lose track of what I’m thinking about, I want to express a few things about Miller. I keep telling my girlfriend that he is the most underappreciated literary figure in American history. What’s most compelling about Miller at the current time is my complete inability to express what’s so special about him. Yes, I’ve talked about his unique way to protest. Yes, I’ve mentioned his “first draft as final draft” and transparent autobiographical novel style. But no matter what I say about him, I’m sure I’m still missing the core of his being. I feel that I still have so much more to learn about this genius. I also have more to uncover regarding his importance to this generation of Americans (or Earthlings). Next I’ll probably try to tackle his reputed masterpiece, the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy.

In reality I haven’t accomplished what I set out to do with this blog post, and that was simply to list some quotes from Black Spring with minimal discussion. I had also planned on making some points about how Henry Miller would have loved to see the massive jump in creativity that is resulting from digital technologies and the Internet. That just goes to show that I haven’t written enough lately, or maybe it’s evidence that I’m slowly taking on particular traits of my writer heroes. One of Miller’s prominent characteristics was extreme attention deficit. If I remember correctly, Tropic of Capricorn starts and ends within a very small time frame, and everything in between is either a remembrance from the past or an exploration from his imagination.

However, I don’t take the blog format for granted. In this spontaneous, convenient writing environment, I often feel more productive than times that I write in Microsoft Word. But after 1,300 words of this, I think I will leave you with a passage which, since it was written in the stretch of 1934-1935 — before both World War II and some famous works from that era by George Orwell and Jean Paul Sartre — was a highly prophetic statement:

“I cannot forget that I am making history, a history on the side which, like a chancre, will eat away at the other meaningless history. I regard myself not as a book, a record, a document, but as a history of our time–a history of all time.

“If I was unhappy in America, if I craved more room, more adventure, more freedom of expression, it was because I needed these things. I am grateful to America for having made me realize my needs. I served my sentence there. At present I have no needs. I am a man without a past and without a future. I am–that is all. I am not concerned with your likes and dislikes; it doesn’t matter to me whether you are convinced that what I say is so or is not. It is all the same to me if you drop me here and now. I am not an atomizer from which you can squeeze a thin spray of hope. I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night settling in and that mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots” (pp. 23-24).

The first time I saw Kerouac clearly outline his own style was in Desolation Angels, when he made it especially clear that most of his books were written with little to no hope of ever being published. In fact he was writing for the sake of writing, because he believed that was the reason life was bestowed upon him. But that’s not the topic I mean to address here. For those not familiar with Angels, it’s a very long novel for Kerouac — about 400 pages — and it’s roughly divided into two books: “Desolation Angels” and “Passing Through.” A section in the first book called “Desolation in Solitude” basically contains his notebook writings from a summer spent on wildfire watch atop a mountain in Washington State.

I was actually more fond of the “Passing Through” parts, since they contain some of his most straightforward writing, in comparison to his more poetic, abstract work. One of the most interesting sections in Angels came a few pages from the end, when he talks about his friend Cody Pomeroy (the fictionalized name of his good friend Neal Cassady). The section points to why Cassady was so influential in Kerouac’s life:

“He is a believer in life and he wants to go to Heaven but because he loves life so he embraces it so much he thinks he sins and will never see Heaven. [...] You could have ten thousand cold eyed Materialistic officials claim they love life too but can never embrace it so near sin and also never see Heaven. [...] They sin by lifelessness! [...] Cody had a wife whom he really loved, and three kids he really loved, and a good job on the railroad. But when the sun went down his blood got hot:—hot for old lovers like Joanna, for old pleasure like marijuana and talk, for jazz, for the gayety that any respectable American wants in a life growing more arid by the year in Law Ridden America. [...] He filled his car with friends and booze and pot and batted around looking for ecstasy…” (pp. 405-406).

This passage got me thinking about what we perceive to be normal and abnormal when it comes to behavior and lifestyle. In many ways the Internet is making weird things — like indie music, for example — more commonplace. But are unique people and things actually being molded to fit within the status quo? Is there even a real Outsider in America anymore? Or have we all be corralled into our homes, discouraged from embarking on roaming adventures, turned on to comfort and technological luxuries, and told to live quietly and obediently? I haven’t decided yet. Maybe we’re just learning to vent our weird behavior at the correct time and place, such as at a music festival. After all, they have become extremely common as this decade progressed — and now even Michigan has Rothbury.

My next Kerouac project will be to read Visions of Cody, a book that I’ve heard Kerouac would have preferred On The Road to be like. It’s supposed to be an alternate take on his travels with Cassady, transcribed in part from tape recorded conversations between the two.

Recently I realized  that it would be very difficult to write consistently on here about fiction and philosophy. Not only would it be exhausting, but I’m just not sure that I have those kind of resources. For this post, I turn to a sort of nonfiction reference book. I caught wind of Sin & Syntax by Constance Hale on a trip to the MSU Computer Store circa Spring 2007. A girl working at the counter set the book down to assist me, and I couldn’t help reading the cover when she went into the store room.

I found the book used on Amazon and started reading. For someone who hasn’t had an English class since 2001, this was a hefty undertaking. This feeling was increased since, on more than one occasion, I disagreed with her suggestions. For example, she seems to prefer third-person writing to first-person without question.

“In today’s culture of confession, many writers prefer the first-person point of view. Unabashed subjectivity may be fine for ever-popular memoirs on incest and inside-the-Beltway intrigue, but the third-person point of view remains the standard in news reporting and writing that aims to inform, because it keeps the focus off the writer and on the subject” (p. 36).

She’s correct about focus, but some of the greatest literature — especially in American history — has been told from the first-person view: The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, The Sun Also Rises, etc. Plus (as if I haven’t already made this clear), the authors that got me to write were all using first-person: Kerouac, Thompson, Miller. I would even go so far as to suggest that third-person writing is a way of hiding behind other characters, instead of facing the story head-on. Or maybe I just can’t understand the concept of omnipotence, or pretending to know what dozens of characters are thinking and feeling, let alone saying out loud.

Hale progresses through three parts: Words, Sentences, and Music. Each subsection (i.e. – Nouns) features both Cardinal Sins (what to avoid at all costs) and Carnal Pleasures (what to work hard at developing). One of her Cardinal Sins is the way that journalism copy editors remove interjections (short words or phrases intended for strong effect more than meaning), leaving the writing stale and sterilized.

How she omits Kerouac — one of the most poetic prose writers of all time, who infused jazz into his words in amazing ways — from the Music section is beyond me. But regardless of my opposition, the book is still worth reading.

I recently finished Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. I feel that it was the missing link in my literary inspirations, particularly as a precursor to Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson. On one hand, I can’t believe that I didn’t hear about Miller until 2008. On the other hand, I can understand why he would be misunderstood and looked over by many modern readers.

One section towards the end of the book seemed especially useful for Supraterranean.com.

“What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when the night presents the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns? What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the remembrance of fang-whorl and star cluster” (p. 250).

Most things that seem huge and scary to us are really, in the grand scope of the universe, minuscule and unimportant. We should lead humble lives, strive toward rediscovering our collective past, and work together to uncover our greater destiny.

Miller understood this, and that’s why he’s one of my new favorite authors. He was one of the most unique minds I’ve ever encountered. And exposing the contents and capabilities of unique minds is what we’re all about here at Supraterranean.com! What’s inside of yours?