Wednesday, June 9, 2010

the myth of sisyphus

My life as Sisyphus began in the Army. If I ever felt that my work was meaningless or menial before that, I don't remember it. I undertook the first few years quite seriously, rolling my proverbial boulder up the hill, and watching it roll back down again. I am pretty sure I skipped and clicked my heels downhill after it, glistening and eager to roll it back to the top again. Then, I began to race myself, and race others. I got a kick out of showing how fast I could roll that rock back to the top, and how I could run to beat it back to the bottom. At some point, this drill began to take a physical toll on me, and gradually an emotional toll, too. I barely recognize myself anymore. There are moments when the pointlessness of my work washes over me, and threatens to tell my entire life as a joke with no punch line. In such moments, tears spring up out of nowhere, much to the consternation of my peers, superiors, and subordinates. I am usually at a loss to explain why I am on the verge of tears, but true to form, I try: I roll my oversized burden back up the hill, huffing and puffing and trying to demonstrate the absurdity of it. I am going through the motions, and I don't know how much longer I can hold up. I keep waiting for someone to tell me, "you don't have to roll that boulder up the hill anymore--what idiot told you to do it in the first place?" No such luck. I am doomed, like Sisyphus, to spend what seems like an eternity fully aware of the pointlessness of my existence, but unable to stop rolling the damn rock up the hill, and trailing it back down to its starting place again.

The day I was introduced to Sisyphus, by way of Camus, is burned into my brain. It was my high school English class, and we had just finished Shakespeare's "Hamlet." We were preparing to segway into Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrans and Guildenstern are Dead," but first, my teacher wanted to mark the philosophical shift into postmodernism. It was a grey, moisture-saturated morning outside, and cool--I wondered if the weather had made coordination with the lesson for that day. The starkness of existentialism as a philosophy struck me first, and then the unbearable weight of it. I did not think that it was viable as a worldview, but the beautiful cynics I had met so far in my life (people who were both real and fictitious, sitting one desk over from me in class or soliloquizing in movies and books) made more sense to me because of it. My brush with existentialism spawned an "Aha!" moment: I now trusted my first hunch, which was to value these people for their awareness, and the fearless resignation with which they called everybody's bluff. I even saw a connection to biblical wisdom, in which the writer of Ecclesiastes laments, "Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless!...What does man gain from all his labor?" (from chapter one)

One summer in college, I picked up a book by the Austrian-born, Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, called I and Thou. His brand of religious existentialism impressed me, especially how he could boil down all of ontology into the "I-It" and "I-Thou" relationship. His work was an exploration of how the self relates to the world, in either an “I-Thou” or an “I-It” relationship, which demonstrates how I value other beings around me. Rather than seeing myself in an “I-It” relationship with my work or my fellow beings, it was a dynamic, fundamentally relational endeavor that required me to operate in an “I-Thou” mindset at every turn. Buber was also concerned with how we label things, claiming that when we call things by their true names, we have power to transform and change them, and to be changed by them, as well (1923, p. 59).

It was Buber who confirmed my suspicions that we too often treat other human beings as resources to be appropriated, rather than as image-bearers of God who carry the divine spark within them, no matter how far hidden or snuffed out it may seem. It was also Buber who helped anchor my sense of how the moral imperatives of Christianity could be freeing rather than cumbersome. Inasmuch as charity and humility enable the Christian to hold the fleeting things of earth lightly, with an open hand, they can also free her from the perceptual tyranny of the urgent and the myopia of the fractured Self, who does not know her place in the world, but insists on being the center of everything. “How may a man who lives in arbitrary self-will become aware of freedom?” Buber asked (1923, p. 59). A piercing question. "...arbitrary self-will and fate, soul's spectre and world's nightmare, endure one another, living side by side and avoiding one another, without connexion or conflict, in meaninglessness--till in an instant there is confused shock of glance on glance, and confession of their non-salvation breaks from them"(Buber, 1923, p. 59).

This self-will is the unexamined, impulsive life, driven by unchecked fears and desires typical to all of us. I have become aware of my own compulsion, and that of others, to make meaning out of the meaningless everyday by imposing our own sheer will upon it--crushing it, impressing others around us to do the same, until we think we have made it matter. I am beginning to see my stupidity in this project, with wet and swollen eyes, far more clearly than I have seen it before. What I do continues to mean very little in the world, though I work for and with people who want everything we do to matter far too much. I always thought that to feel this way was to flirt with depression and social subversion, and on this account I have had difficulty simply stating the utter despair I feel when I think about my daily routine. When my husband is away, which he is rarely, I think it becomes more acute. The seasons, on the other hand, apparently have little to do with it; my work feels meaningless all year round. Sometimes I wonder if it would seem more meaningful if I deployed overseas, but many who return from war tell me that they, too, are often overwhelmed by the sense that their sacrifices and hardships endured there were also senseless and fruitless. All that I know is that I wonder daily, hourly, what hellians will swoop down, who will sound the alarm or publicly denounce me if one day I simply stop rolling the rock up the hill, up the hill, up the hill...