Manifesto Of Surrealism Centennial

One hundred years ago this month André Breton first published his Manifesto of Surrealism. Someone needed to explain why there were buffalo riding the subway. Why childhood arches over our lives with its unobtainable trinkets and drowns in the slavish timidity of adulthood.

The manifesto begins: “So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life – real life, I mean – that in the end this belief is lost.”

This is a powerful statement, one that resounds with the pangs of Tantalus, the Greek mythological figure who was punished for revealing many of the secrets of the gods. His punishment consisted of standing in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches, always just a little out of reach, and to make matters worse whenever he went to take a drink, the water receded. This is, in many ways, a metaphor for the human condition. Man, Breton continues, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been let to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts…

I find it fascinating that a book that delves so profoundly into the mysteries of human consciousness aligns its agitations with the hard realities of existence, the yearning for what is unobtainable, the yearning for what is ill-defined and maddeningly Orphic, the yearning for beauty, for the marvelous. “This is because,” Breton writes, “he henceforth belongs body and soul to an imperative practical necessity which demands his constant attention. None of his gestures will be expansive, none of his ideas generous or far-reaching. In his mind’s eye, events real or imagined will be seen only as they relate to a welter of similar events, events in which he has not participated, abortive events. What am I saying: he will judge them in relationship to one of these events whose consequences are more reassuring than the others. On no account will he view them as his salvation.”

We now inhabit a technocratic dystopia of disembodied sidewalk zombies hopelessly riveted to handheld gadgets, electronic screens dominated by a commercial holocaust of satisfactions that are incapable of satisfying, but whose true achievement is the death of critical thinking, assaults on the imagination and a diminished capacity for idle speculation. Salvation is critical. We live in a panopticon of technocratic surveillance, the death of solitude, oligarchic rapacity, Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son.

Breton’s manifestation appeared at a time of counterfeit splendors, cars and airplanes, the fruits of technology, exultations of empirical totality and industrial giants encoding human experience with false goals and alluring seductions. Breton masterfully and ingeniously borrows the language of science (he had practiced psychiatry during WWI, which is where he discovered the liberating force of free association, the free flow of speech, by way of Sigmund Freud, for whom he had enormous respect) in order to reenchant the world.

“Today is the crisis in consciousness.” Mina Loy, 1914.

In science, truth is that which gives us the maximum sum of our tastes, but its coherence with respect to previous truth as well as with respect to the new fact remains the most imperative requirement.

Said William James on the subject of pragmatism. Pragmatism has little to do with surrealism, which makes it the perfect candidate for the demon of analogy. The less two things have to do with another the more they attract, the more they broaden the scope of what is possible. There is a magnetism in things that draws us to an overflow of sensation, vast magnetic fields of fragrant affiliation, mountains of rocky correlation, diaphanous waves of Being, silky convulsions of voluptuous interaction, of illuminating frictions, of opposing charges creating sparks of revelatory heat, dilations of plasmatic space, the opening of an astronomy of dreams.

Surrealism isn’t a theory, it’s a discovery. The French have a word – dépaysement – which means to disorient, to be disorientated, quite generally by finding oneself in another country, another territory or zone, à la Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker. In this case, the region, the territory, the zone is surrealism, not just as an aesthetic, a treatment of paint or language, but a philosophy, an approach to life that claws at reality for a more vivid reading of the sidewalk, a deeper understanding of the metaphysics of light, or the thousand and more miracles in the intricacies of milk; the beauty of the semicolon, the splendor of feathers, the genius of orchids, the fleshy aerial roots of Vanilla planifolia or tart suggestions of paradise in a pint of ale.

Surrealism, Dr. Breton warns us, “does not allow those who devote themselves to it to forsake it whenever they like.” A driver license test, for example, or a conference on the emergence of narrative in the cinema in which some modicum of sobriety might be recommended. Not all situations in life are amenable to the impulses of surrealism and the impish whimsies of the notorious Id, which Edgar Allan Poe termed “the imp of the perverse.” He refers to it (somewhat jokingly I hope) as a disorder, and something to be concealed temporarily so that we may pursue a career or social life.

“There is every reason to believe,” André continues, “that it acts on the mind very much as drugs do” (aha, I think to myself, no wonder I’m so drawn to this odd manifestation of the literary arts), “like drugs, it creates a certain state of need and can push man to frightful revolts. It also is, if you like, an artificial paradise, and the taste one has for it derives from Baudelaire’s criticism for the same reason as the others. Thus the analysis of the mysterious effects and special pleasures it can produce – in many respects Surrealism occurs as a new vice which does not necessarily seem to be restricted to the happy few; like hashish, it has the ability to satisfy all manner of tastes – such an analysis has to be included in the present study.”

It's helpful to remember that in 1924 the public and literary worlds hadn’t completely severed; an artistic movement was often anticipated to have observable effects on society, and sometimes it did. The din of machinery paused and angels shook their hair over our roofs. Poetry’s wildly erratic alphabet beaded on the windows. Or, at the very least, it consorted with the zeitgeist. Today’s bleak tendencies are less accommodating. The tide has ebbed, revealing the suck of the estuary. The literary scenes in the U.S. and England, if not the rest of Europe, could comfortably inhabit a tiny island in the ocean of your choice. Fahrenheit 451 has become a reality. Energy, however, cannot be created or destroyed. There persist qualia that resist the juggernauts of commodity. Surrealism, like a mycorrhizal fungi, persists in the forest understory. People make one of two comments when interviewed after a catastrophe, either “it was like a movie,” or “it was surreal.”

Poetry, Breton declares, “bears within itself the perfect compensation for the miseries we endure…The time is coming when it decrees the end of money and by itself will break the bread of heaven for the earth! There will still be gatherings on the public squares, and movements you never dared hope participate in.” This is, of course, the inflammatory Breton sounding very manifesto-ish. But wait. There’s more: “Farewell to absurd choices, the dreams of dark abyss, rivalries, the prolonged patience, the flight of the seasons, the artificial order of ideas, the ramp of danger, time for everything. May you only take the trouble to practice poetry. Is it not incumbent upon us, who are already living off it, to try and impose what we hold to be our case for further inquiry?”

It’s a fair question. Despite the madness, the folly, the fights, the extravagances, the prodigious gravitations, the prodigal éclats of unabashed absurdity, the self-imposed poverty, the cold and flickering candles of the attic, or the chaos and inebriations of the loft, the race to get to heaven before they close the door, the panic to patch a leaking sanity, the uncommon bouts with reality, those blows to the ego, those marvelous procrastinations in which fallow fields grew fertile, alchemical sublimations of massa confusa performed in delicate solitudes, purification in albedo, voices crying on a table, soon there won’t be anything but snow on the sea, despite this, despite these strange, beautiful, alienating gifts, is the urgency justified? Is the effort worth the wounds and injuries? What is meant by ‘incumbent.’ How is anything this seemingly immaterial in any way incumbent? What is my responsibility as a poet? Responsibility and poetry seem like very odd bedfellows. But I see his point. The intensity is obvious, a little more subtle, perhaps, are the efforts to contain it, to give it a grounded and cogent prose.

“Surrealism, such as I conceive of it, asserts our complete nonconformism clearly enough so that there can be no question of translating it, at the trial of the real world, as evidence for the defense,” Breton writes in the final paragraph of the manifesto. “This world is only very relatively in tune with thought, and incidents of this kind are only the most obvious episodes of a war in which I am proud to be participating.” Lovely, the way he refers to surrealist practice as “this world.” A world that runs parallel and invisibly aside the world of commerce, daunting high-rises full of brokers and bankers and lawyers and fish. Beautiful aquariums in the palaces of capital and finance. Is this reality? It is for many.

They used to be everywhere in the 60s: people. Flesh and blood people. Readers. Dreamers. People who read Rimbaud and Mallarmé, McClure and Kerouac, Lamantia and Dianne di Prima. Gwendolyn Brooks and Joanne Kyger. Richard Brautigan. Bob Kaufman. Gertrude Stein. The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley. Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, by Richard Farina. The Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord. The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude by Étienne de La Boétie. Their names bring it back to me, make it palpable again, make it immediate. It’s a trick of the mind. A sacred fever. “The earth,” muses Breton, “draped in its verdant cloak, makes as little impression upon me as a ghost.”

I know that feeling. I both love it and respect it. Whenever I’m given to a troubling urgency, whenever I surrender to impulses of otherworldly hue, I’m there. I’m here. I’m nowhere. “It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.”

Thank you, Monsieur Breton, for the many rebellions and that page by page house insanely glazed in the wide open sky. For earthlight and soluble fish. For surrealism and mesmerism and horsehair massage gloves and a door to the universe and the chandeliers in the lobby of the Hotel Elsewhere. Who needs money when your pockets are full of typhoons?

 

Words Arranged As Thoughts Leaping Into The Air

 

This is all about the steady flow of perceptions the scrotum is a place of great decorum a neon fox flashing on and off in the Kansas night the walls are soft and the voice will not echo the cod are visible below the waves I will address the crowd from the balcony

If I shift my legs I can alter my perception of gravity I find warmth uplifting I turn the wheel with the gross willingness of the stalwart prose is thought poetry is vocabulary see if there’s a gun in the glove box is that prose or poetry maybe it’s neither maybe it’s both maybe it’s a kettledrum words are such beautiful comedians it was obvious the paragraph was sick and needed some vocal cords ever open a pop bottle that overflowed and got your fingers sticky those branches carry beautiful blossoms every time I get engrossed in Cézanne I grow pagan

There’s a sign up ahead I want to shoot we hardly know our own preferences in abstract matters I would like you to have my opinion of humankind it’s mostly conversations with strangers lines and angles and volumes and planes the thunderous spatula of convalescence a friend who goes to the store for a six-pack and returns with an ocean

One need only accept the sparkle of propagation fruits consequences facts the anomalous propagation of radar might be overly urbane why is pragmatism something that people settle for useless questions and metaphysical abstractions what we really want is the raw heat of the moment

The library felt palmy today and reciprocal I oiled my destination with romance I once felt clockwise about an elf that I created with my legs it’s not always easy to predict what a gas is going to do the perpendicularity of your vomit is odd the new idea is then adopted by a family of verbs what a hawk in a greenhouse sounds like is gut-wrenching coming out of a harmonica I would give a thousand horizons for a pearl of such beauty

Whatever happened to Cameran Diaz teary-eyed farewell bugs ever notice the words ‘write’ and ‘writhe’ are distinguished only by an ‘h’ and are semantically similar should one appreciate to its fullest the labor of bringing something new into the world words arranged as iridescent feathers thoughts leaping into the air like dogs catching sticks Cesarean cookies dusted with penicillin a prompt dereliction stimulating unkempt comparisons I feel heavy holding everything better to wander nude in a stationary store than stifle on a Greyhound tickling people creates interesting deformities

Here are some ways to think about thinking never marry an opinion to breathe is to interact with the air in the unlimited leisure of the wilderness discussion had been worn threadbare we returned to the theory of the breaststroke just to get us through the night nothing warms the legs like denim the all-enveloping air invites us to open our breath to the reality of ourselves oysters prior to a rebellion the hour coughs monkeys and the market scales are studded with consideration I have an array of chattering coupons and by that I mean the table upon which rests a thunderbolt of sonata ice

I’ve never seen the night look so black firm chewy candy and North American deer parade through my mind I can get by once I see the lettuce sparkle in the morning sun I do back dives in my sleep it feels stunning to leap blindly into space thinking generally occurs when you’re not looking sometimes it thunders in syllogisms molecules and ether the swans are exceptionally preternatural this year which proves the existence of pretzels pragmatism is a subtle crack in the argument with spin variables the actual universe is wide open any idea that will carry us from one part of our experience to any other part is like spiraling through space in dilations of beautiful rhetoric and reminds me of Amarillo 

 

 

 

To Be Relished In Private

 

There’s no substitute for muskmelon at least not until we got stuck in the rain and discovered God in the straw how much does the taste of liberty weigh if you hear me moan it’s because I’m having a dream of cherries what can I give you besides a pleonasm in naked transparency aren’t eyebrows wonderful will we ever discover ourselves happy on a beet farm dear Mr. Fantasy play us a tune something to make us all happy I’ll light a candle & put it in the window I find reality has been turned upside down at the bottom of the pool

When is that damned Safeway going to open I will put my thoughts in a fever and see if I can produce an inkling of understanding I’m feeling something I don’t know what it is what I’m feeling which is often a cause of hair and to be relished in private the North American Pine Squid isn’t real nor did I make it up my sense of proportion is bad I once tried to cross a notebook with a barracuda thereby broadening my capacity for love

Marcel Proust was my roommate in college I lay awake pestering him with questions how does one accept the absurdity of life he said there’s a special cookie that fills the mind with splendor flavorful interactions pink umbrellas a subconscious recognition that we do not understand ourselves we must talk through it sweat through our T-shirts the mouth searches for words philosophical fat intentions connectivity oysters owls bogus excuses curtain rods silverware and drums I like you I trust you let’s shake hands and settle the deal over dinner thought is the enemy of flow the beginner’s mind art yields nothing but accidents beautiful things pantyhose lingerie the smells of Cairo in the 1980s sapphires ignition coils breasts and quantum equations Hilary Hahn playing J.S. Bach Concerto No. 1 in A minor the world goes to rags in the evening if you agree to walk my poodle I’ll give you an arena with good acoustics and fill it with a regatta

I won’t deny it there are pebbles in the mailbox echoes in a bee helicopters with great amenities things you wouldn’t expect like tiny sea polyps and varsity jalapenos the arteries of the rose filled with the blood of lovers which is why the chemical system of our cells often produce puzzling consonants crumbling paradigms basal cognition isn’t philosophical fluff which is why worms don’t have necks poetry supports nothing but teeth cyborgs jam at the local bar music never ends it continues over the horizon even our carpet has currents running in it it’s amazing how obstinate some people can be roaring about cybernetic toys the great cholesterol scam the taste of success which is oftentimes bitter there’s a pill under development that may reduce tinnitus others insist the wind lives in a cave by the sea I don’t know what to make of any of this

As for kidney stones the pain was so bad I was sweating bullets why do I keep bringing it up my memory keeps retrieving the sticks I throw my legs are levers and comrades evening mists caress the dying of the sun there’s a fire in the room a bright reflection the garden has a stranger standing in it a woman in black scribbling madly in a small book

 

 

 

 

My Dinner With Andre

Last night I watched My Dinner with Andre on my laptop. I hadn't seen it in 43 years. I remember seeing it the first time at the Seven Gables theater in Seattle shortly after its release in October, 1981, and how galvanized I was when I left the theater. I felt 50 pounds lighter, as if I’d had a burden lifted by a remarkably gifted therapist. The steady flow of perceptions and ideas about contemporary life were expressed with such eloquence and passion that I was only dimly aware of the quail they were eating. It’s only now that I even noticed there had been no comment about the food. How good it was, how disappointing it was, how well-cooked it was. Nothing. Not a word. Though I do remember Wallace Shawn remarking at how small the quail were when they first arrived at the table, causing a look of chagrin in the waiter’s craggy old face. As soon as the brief interlude of their dinner arriving at the table was over the conversation resumed its former intensity and the food became an afterthought. Everything was about personal discovery in a society that had grown stale and anesthetized. These were things I’d been struggling with, artificiality, robotic behavior, shallowness, banality, vapidity, and a deep alienation. It was exhilarating to hear these issues articulated with such ardent cogency.

I was 34 years old in 1981 and working for a mail service. This had not been my ambition in life. It’s where you find yourself when you haven’t been looking, when you haven’t been paying attention to the ongoing evolution of your life and how stalled and stagnant it had become by comparison to the anticipated successes graduation from college was supposed to obtain. My degree was in English. I had the kind of resumé that induced laughter in employment bureaus. The job, which was a good one, it paid reasonably well and had good benefits, was part-time. I continued to write, as I always had, but never submitting anything. One too many rejections and the illusions I fostered would burst in a fall of hapless confetti. And so I procrastinated, stuffed my work in a drawer feeling partially satisfied I’d achieved something and was growing as an artist and went to movies and bars and drank Rabelaisian quantities of whiskey and ale. When I wasn’t working, of course. The routine of work was helpful in certain ways, apart from the salary; it helped structure my life and kept me from falling over the edge into total chaos.

I was also married at the time, though that was due to end in a few years.

My frame of mind had taken a very dark turn in 1980. In November, Ronald Reagan had been elected president and in December, John Lennon was murdered, shot in the back four times by a deranged fan in the 72^nd Street entrance to the Dakota apartment building. These events stood as emblems, as signs, as reflections of the zeitgeist. The neoliberal economics that came with Reagan, essentially a juggernaut of free market capitalism that was quick to inject its poison into mainstream culture, and the emergence of a new technology: computers. I knew then that one of the early victims of information technology would be books. Literature. An appreciation of the written word and the provocation and preservation of critical thinking. Pretty much everything I valued most deeply and had devoted my life to was increasingly threatened by forces and behaviors I hadn’t fully understood as yet, or learned how to adapt or avoid. Avoidance, I would soon find, was impossible. The new monster was omnipresent. Adaptation came in the form of a Wild Turkey and Courvoisier and deep immersions in Dada and Marcel Duchamp.

My Dinner With Andre opens with Wallace Shawn walking down a seedy Manhattan street dressed in a knee-length trench coat giving an inner dialogue prompted by his upcoming dinner with Andre. The life of a playwright is tough, he hadn’t sold any plays recently, his agent wasn’t calling with acting jobs, and bills were amassing; how was he going to pay them? There’s a bit of biography: he grew up wealthy on the Upper East Side, lived like an aristocrat, all he thought about was art and music, and here he was now, age 36, on his way to have dinner with a man he’d been avoiding, a valued colleague in the theater, a former theater director named André. Wally sounded just like me, hapless, worried and frustrated. I liked him immediately.

André turns out to be charming and charismatic, genuinely affable and happy to see his old friend. He’s older, and seems wealthy. This is implied by the restaurant he’s chosen to have dinner with his friend, a pretty posh place with impeccably dressed and distinguished waiters. I’d forgotten this. I’d somehow remembered the dinner taking place in a bistro, a dimly lit bohemian atmosphere, a time warp of the 60s in 80s Manhattan. This was due to the camera being so closely focused on their table and facial expressions. You forget how big the restaurant actually is. The restaurant was modeled on the Café des Artistes, a New York restaurant on the Upper West Side that had been a favorite of the upscale bohemia since 1917. It closed in late August, 2009. The restaurant where the movie was filmed was, in fact, at the then-vacant Jefferson Hotel in Richmond, Virginia.

The movie kicks into high gear about mid-way in. This is where Wally delivers an astonishing speech, in a response to a story André told about his mother’s dying, and looking like a survivor of Auschwitz or Dachau, and how a specialist put a spin of positivity on her health based solely on his observation of a problematic arm, and said she was coming along wonderfully, “psychically killing us by taking us into a dream world where we become confused and frightened,” and the inability of his friends to express themselves honestly and warmly about the death of his mother. Instead, they told jokes that prevented him from expressing his true feelings. Wally responds to this with great warmth and sincerity: “I mean, we just put no value at all on perceiving reality, I mean, on the contrary, this incredible emphasis that we all place now on our so-called careers automatically makes perceiving reality a very low priority. Because, if your life is organized around trying to be successful in a career, well, it just doesn't matter what you perceive or what you experience. You can really sort of shut your mind off for years ahead, in a way, you can sort of turn on the automatic pilot. You know, just the way your mother's doctor had on his automatic pilot when he went in, and he looked at the arm, and he totally failed to perceive anything else.”

I find these revelations especially pertinent now. Conversations – real flesh and blood conversations – are rare these days. Most of my social life occurs on a social media or social networking service. Pixels. Comments. Virtual friends. Some may actually be friends, but I very rarely see them. The people I interact with in this highly controlled and illusory realm of technology seem pretty nice, and I wish I could have actual conversations with them. Because when I do have an actual conversation, the actuality of what is said can be stunning. A lot depends on the people with whom you’re talking. Some people simply won’t allow too much sincerity, too open a dialogue, too personal a conversation. Emotions have become awkward again, the way they were in the 50s.

The real problem is one of fear and intolerance. People, when they’re overwhelmed by too much stimulus, too many new developments in their environment, become highly anxious and unsure of what’s real and what’s not real. They adhere to a consensus no matter how detached from reality it may be because a consensus is comfortable, stable, and preserves the status quo. The status quo is like your favorite armchair, a chair so comfortable that it mollifies you like morphine. Anything that threatens that chair is evil and must be destroyed. Canceled. Quarantined. Killed.

One of the hallmarks of totalitarianism, said Hannah Arendt, is a cynical willingness to believe in propaganda. “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world,” she observed, “the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

Something to think about next time we get together with friends over dinner.

Orchid Show

Yesterday we visited the conservatory at Volunteer Park to see the orchid show. It felt good to step into the warmth. I like conservatories, there’s something enchanting about a glass house full of tropical plants. As soon as you enter you’re enveloped in a spell of primal sensation, fascinating shapes and subtle hues, weird organs and big veined leaves. The orchids were mounted on a table at the center of the room. The first to catch my attention was Comparettia speciosa, tiny heart-shaped flowers of vivid tangerine. A comical looking Rossioglossum Rawdon Jester shot propeller-like petals into the space, as if being an orchid were intrinsically funny. Orchids are notoriously complicated. That’s what makes them funny. Proust never the left the house without an orchid in his lapel. He knew. Complication is funny, and strangely erotic, like the Sphinx Moth with its long proboscis for pollinating the white flowers of Hell’s Love.

An elderly man with his gray hair in a ponytail stood by the table answering questions. He had a badge that said “Ask Me About Orchids.” He was quite erudite on the subject. We asked him how to pollinate an orchid and he said pour yourself a glass of wine and get a toothpick. He did a good job fielding the kind of questions a fussy exotic flower like the orchid inspires, how should orchids be watered, what’s the best potting material, how do I get my orchid to rebloom, how to repot an orchid, is it true Confucius used to keep orchids in his room for inspiration for his writing, what does Theophrastus have to say on the subject of orchids? Is being a Druid the answer to existence? I fell under the spell of a Paphiopedilum henryanum. It answered in silence.

Orchids have a lot of tricks up their sleeves. Their entire existence seems to be focused on pollination. Ways to lure insects into their various traps and pollinium. Bucket orchids have a modified labellum that forms a bucket that traps male euglossine bees. Ellanthus and Isochilus orchids attract hummingbirds with a rich nectar of sugars and amino acids. The bee orchid has a large lip-shaped petal that resembles a female bee. The warty hammer orchid of Western Australia produces a chemical scent that mimics the pheromone of a sexually receptive female thynnine wasp. What strange intelligence moves through these things? How do they figure these things out? Science does not think, said Heidegger. He was a real pistil, that guy.

Orchis italica, commonly known as the naked man orchid or the Italian orchid, is a species of orchid native to the Mediterranean. Orchis bohemia resembles a poet living in obscurity in the south of France. Orchis Julianus resembles a Romanian filmmaker. The venerable Orchis wiseass has a unique strategy for luring young women into its purview and squirting them with lemonade. They say the right kind of orchid can bring so much beauty into your home that the entire substrate of reality begins to creak and stubbornly approve the vague proposals we bring into the realm of the epiphyte. Live with an orchid and live with universals in your tea. Intuitions about your skull. Attracting pollinators. Philosophers whose eyes blur with divine pollinations.

 

From The Bureau Of Delectable Implosions

Newborn sirloin. Geodesic syllabus. Liquidated scratch fathom. Guidelines masticated into haiku banshee tongs.

Listen to the obloquy primrose. Carmine executive bluish from being obvious. Cardiovascular canister of stereophonic tackle.

Tacky geriatrics. Round twinges at the turpentine cinema. Corduroy gas. Tottering obstetrics under a utensil tree.

Eternal palm as pink as scrabble. Supposedly cubes. Blasted into curls. Change the infantry. Kitchen phenomena seeking ambulatory spinach.

Bolt gourd someday snowing. Position fricassee. Chlorophyll disciples in full vulgarity.

The shipwrecked house ruined my welcome and became a hot bucket of squalor.

Chlorinated bombard fission abruptly enclosed in the skull.

Complementary euphemisms perched on a rod of sticky generality.

Geometric gems goofy as coagulation.

Scrubby terrain with a crust of understanding.

I own nothing but a page of animals, some of which can jump through the light.

Others are more circular.

They belch colors that thrust themselves into the water.

Nowhere salami before any deductions create ovals in the mouth.

Niceties in a tub of protons. Remembrance system chattering thwarts. Crowbar twirling in commas. Carpentry blazing with Monday. A little sweet negligence from the bureau of delectable implosions. And a squab. And a squabble. And a waterway of capricious inclinations.

  

Absurdity And Suicide

Some few years before my brother passed away from a sudden illness, he began an immersion in the work of Albert Camus. He asked me, during a phone conversation, if I knew anything about Camus, or if I thought of him as absurd, as an absurdist. I told him I knew very little. He wasn’t my cup of tea. I vaguely remembered reading Camus in junior college as an assignment but little else. The image that came to mind was of a solitary man brooding on his mother. I thought the writing was dreary and mundane and didn’t pursue it. When I thought of the absurd in art and literature figures like Harpo Marx came to mind, and Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett, Groucho Marx and Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco and The Goon Show. Silliness, outrageousness, maniacal hijinks. I didn’t see Camus as an absurdist, I saw him as a worldly cynic with a Gauloises in his mouth and a fatalistic glint in his eyes. The Humphrey Bogart of the French existentialists.

My brother was right. I googled absurdism and Albert Camus and received a truckload of information on the subject, beginning with the AI Overview: Albert Camus was a French philosopher and Nobel Prize laureate who is known for his contributions to the philosophy of absurdism. His philosophy of absurdism is based on the idea that the universe is irrational and meaningless, and that humans should embrace this absurdity and find meaning in life.

It goes to the heart of what my brother was struggling with at the time, which I can’t possibly know in its entirety, its multiplexities and thorny conundrums, but based on some of the events we both mutually coped with, I know a lot of his malaise was linked to the collapse and disintegration of just about everything, freedom of speech, the right to privacy, the Bill of Rights, the constitution, the rampant criminality and corruption in government, the endless wars, the many frustrations and heartbreaks caused by an insanely inefficient and predatory healthcare system, the day-to-day grind of asphyxiating routine, the stresses of traffic and humiliations of work, the incivility of people and their buried rage. Things you can’t talk about in polite society anymore. Hence, I really looked forward to the conversations with my brother, which usually took place on his birthday. I was also quite embarrassed about my ignorance on the subject of absurdism, especially since I was the lit guy and my brother had a contempt for eggheads.

It was Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus that most captivated my brother. It articulated his attitude toward life, an attitude he’d begun questioning, siphoning, and battling, wrestling à la Jacob and the angel – or was that God? – in an effort to find a fulfilling answer, or a liberating nullity. He was embroiled in a confrontation with life, a soulful interrogation, a candid exploration outside the purviews of superficial therapies designed to put you back to work, bring you back into the fold to become a functioning member of a baldly toxic society. I wish I could’ve been of bigger help to him. My take on the absurd seemed clownish and self-indulgent matched against heavyweights like Kierkegaard and Camus. I used humor to accept and sometimes celebrate the irrationalities of contemporary life, the bizarre cruelties and arbitrary misfortunes. I didn’t get low and dirty and mess with the greasy mechanics of the human condition. That conversation with my brother left me with a sense of inadequacy, an intellectual popinjay.

I had to remind myself, that if it weren’t for the fool, I’d never be able to make it through King Lear. The final absurdity of the play is survivable because of the fool’s lunatic language. I began to see a link between the dada absurdity of Dali and the dark, nihilistic absurdity of Camus. For Camus it was all about endlessly and repeatedly pushing a boulder to the top of a hill only to see it come rolling down again, the whole cycle repeating itself ad nauseum. Just like real life: get up, get dressed, go to work. Get up, get dressed, go to work. Ad nauseum.

Meaning doesn’t come in a cereal box. You have to build it yourself. Dream it. Conceive it. Construct it. Give it a trial run. Superimpose its diaphanous beauty over the ugliness of our industrial world. Look for significance between the cracks, between the rules, over there in the margins, the ditch at the side of the road, where the rabbit disappeared down a deep hole.

The first thing I discovered about Camus is that the writing was a lot more beautiful than I’d remembered, probing, unflinching, intellectually honest. And also quite elegant.

The Myth of Sisyphus begins with a core statement: “There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy… I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.”

The phrase “the meaning of life” generally triggers a great deal of laughter in today’s world. It’s considered to be hilariously sophomoric, a futile endeavor, not worth the time, what really matters to most people is making money. Money has meaning. Everything hinges on that. Bank accounts. Credit cards. Real estate. Investments. Asset management. Compound interest. Life is peripheral. Life without money means you set up a tent on the sidewalk. You’re kicked to the curb. Literally. Everyone loves that word: literally. Words without metaphor or allegory. Words in their most basic sense. No fooling around. No verbal flourishes. Leave that to the poets and weirdos. What people mostly value now is either brute survival, or what kind of yacht to buy.

Camus doesn’t promote suicide. He argues against it on the principle that suicide is a rejection of freedom. Does the absurd dictate death? No. Of course not. “For everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it.” Hamlet – that tortured soul who delivers one of the most beautiful speeches of all time on the subject of suicide, “to be or not to be” – emphasizes this point in the simplest of terms: “There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.” I would argue with Hamlet on this point, and ask him if this formula applied to the murder of his father. I don’t know what his answer would be, but I’m sure it’d be terrific.

Life can, occasionally, feel pretty good, even to the most impoverished. There’s that, though it is somewhat beside the point. Because mostly life is painful. The acquisition of food and shelter require daily vigilance and struggle. People get sick. Loved ones die. For a few, there are buffers. It helps considerably to be rich. Food and shelter are never a problem. Healthcare isn’t a problem. The rich are mostly assholes, for reasons that escape me, but the deadening routine of a job isn’t a contributing factor. There was a time in my life when money became easily available, and the usual anxieties were greatly diminished. I was euphoric and kind and nice to people. Even in heavy traffic. So I don’t get it. Why are rich people such assholes? You’d think they’d be as compassionate and jolly as the fat-bellied Buddhas they like to put in their gardens.

That’s a question for another occasion. Being poor doesn’t exclude the possibility of feeling meaningful and fulfilled. Thoreau found serenity and richness in a small cabin in the woods. Buddhists are constantly reminding us of the miseries of attachment. Everyone, rich or poor, will have an encounter with the absurdity of our existence. The poor can be assholes, too. “Men, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them…this ‘nausea,’ as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd.” Giving things a name is a means to achieving some measure of agency in this world. The language we choose to describe and expand our experience is a powerful stimulant and unifying force. “Whatever may be the plays on words and the acrobatics of logic, to understand is, above all, to unify.”

“Things are established by a unity, and ideas and feelings are made into concrete reality through the power of a unifying self,” writes Nishida Kitarō in An Inquiry Into The Good. “The unifying power called the self is an expression of the unifying power of reality; it is an eternal unchanging power. Our self is therefore felt to be always creative, free, and infinitely active.”