The god-like Camus

This last weekend I spent obsessing over the god-like Camus for my thesis. He called himself an Absurdist, and one of the main themes in his writing is, naturally, the Absurd. When he talks about life being Absurd, he doesn't mean that everything is a crazy and nothing matters. He means that humans must live as if there is meaning, but that the universe is meaningless (or humans must live rationally and the universe cannot ultimately be captured by rationality). He seems to be saying that the best way to live in such a world is to continually be aware of both the ultimate irrationality of the universe and, at the same time, to continually revolt against that meaningless-ness in the creation of human meaning. The true temptation, in this world, is to be lured away from awareness of this disjunction between what is human and what is ultimate. This can be either by ignoring the irrationality of the universe and believing only the meaning humans create, or by ignoring human meaning and saying that everything is completely irrational. The point, for him, was to live in both, without letting go of either.

Camus and I live in different worlds and believe quiet different things, but I resonate to this. It seems as though there are similar incongruities in the world I live in. As a Christian, I want to do what is right, or to do the will of God. As a human I also know that it is always possible that I am mistaken in my understanding of what that is. If I let go of either, I will fail. Or to put it another way- Our knowledge of the world is always incomplete and indefinite, but we are constantly having to make definite actions. What gets you through? In my life, so far, it seems as though you just have to guess and act and hope for the best.

I lived in these thoughts like a body all weekend (or maybe they were living me). Tuesday or Wednesday I wound up holding Baby for Janelle (for about an hour?). She fell asleep in my arms. The question presented itself to me then, walking back and forth; how can this be doubted? How is any uncertainty possible? She smiled in her sleep.

I don't know how to resolve all this.

From Ash-Wednesday

"Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining

We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,

Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand,

Forgetting themselves and each other, united

In the quiet of the desert. And neither division nor unity

Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance."

Empty Weekend

Yesterday Chelsea said something about the weather that was rang true. "I like the rain- its the constant cloud cover that gets to me" Isn't that the truth!

And in life too I guess. I could take disasters with definite limits a lot better than I can take this continual gnawing void. Now maybe I should be glad that I'm not having both!

Yesterday (and yes, this is where the title came from) was one of those days when every one disappears to study and the house hums with the lack of people. Maybe it's just growing up in a house with millions of kids, but large empty houses nerve me out. On top of this, on Friday, Josh officially dropped out of school and Karl got fired. Karl had apparently been planning to quite anyway, so its not objectively that bad, but its depressing. And now he's gone to Washington. And Josh... I guess... I guess. So close to the end. It seems such a waste.

I don't know if I'm justified, but I really feel like the muddy and tired surviver of some war. What's left is so little- the grand hopes we started out with, dispensed with one by one in our disasters. What's left? Only a handful of people, too scattered and involved in their own lives to even say goodbye to each other. I guess we are setting out into the real world. But if this is it's harbinger, the thought doesn't comfort me.

lots of vodka

"If we had remembered earlier our Father's house
Where we grew together, and that old kindness,
You would not be dying now, oh my sister, my spouse,
pierced with my sword in the battle's heat and blindness."

C.S. Lewis

Concluding Mythological Postscript

The Noface. I identify with him a lot. In the story the Noface is creepy and eats people. (Note to self: am I creepy and do I eat people?) If you pay attention, though, he simply seems to be mirroring the people around him. In the bad witch's house everyone is consumed with greed, and shows it by begging for the gold he can give them. If they accept his gold, he, well, consumes them. Greed for greed. He is sort of determined by the people he's around.

Despite this, I think he really is just looking for a good person (and maybe a friend?). When Sen comes along and is nice to him and wont accept anything from him (though he offers quite persistently) he follows her, and lets her led him back to the good witch's house where people aren't greedy and he doesn't have to eat anyone.

Anyway. I went to Halloween as the Noface. It was a wonderful costume to have because for once I didn't feel like I had to act. That was just how I felt.

Kaonashi; Noface

And just because I'm pretty sure no one is reading this (PARANOIA:exceptforyourworstenemies
whoreadingiteverydayandaregoingtousethisinformationtodestroyyou), here's about Iraq.

You know every one is saying that the war is a conspiracy or that it was a mistake in the first place, or that Bush is a nut case cowboy, and therefore we should pull out. I am willing to grant all that, but it doesn't seem like that means we should pull out. For the simple reason that once upon a time Iraq had a government that could keep civil war from breaking out and keep other countries from subjugating its people, and we destroyed it. It may have been an evil dictatorship, but it did the things any government is supposed to do. How can we think that somehow the chaos which will ensue if we pull out before they have a stable government again wont be on our heads? That's like 'freeing' an animal that has been trained to never ever eat food that isn't in its dish by tossing it out in the wild. It has the wrong training for survive in the wild and it will probably starve to death.

If we pull out before they can handle it, is there any reason why the shit (that will go down) wont be our fault?

Unless of course you think that this is all a scheme to control the oil and therefore the nefarious orchestrators of this plot mean us to stay in Iraq indefinitely. But I really must know- if the war is really about oil- why in heck are gas prices still so high?

Thou, Nature, art my goddess

All in all, this was not a bad day. I woke up on my own. The day was unhurried and pearly sunny. I got a decent amount of schoolwork done. And I got to read two acts of King Lear out loud with friends, and we all didn't hate each other- and it was a good time. And Kristen did the Fool awesomely. It wasn't the best day ever. It wasn't horrible.

As traumatic as everything can be, it is sometimes comforting to be reminded that the bare minimum of being alive is... a good thing.

notes of a wandering mind

I was looking over some of my notes from class today. Here are some of the things I found.


(This was from the beginning of the term. It reminds me a little bit of The Snowman, by Wallace Stevens, which is suspiciously hanging on my wall. The 'you' is actually me.)

Judge for yourself the silence you must live by
Live in, and live unending
This becomes clearer everyday
As it grows greater
It is more than an escape or an action
More than a solution
It's a mighty ocean,
That you drift into day by day.
For it takes you into itself
Like a gull in the distance,
And you, the silent one, become the soul of silence.



Later in the term.


I've cut myself afloat, and drift in pain
escaping the land, it's burning rain
it's rolling banks of smoke, it's smog,
it's corpses lolling, it's smoldering logs,
it's rubble unending, it's cables and trash-
by the edge of the sea I lashed a raft
and cut myself off from the life I shared
though I surely die here, I wont gangrene there.


At some other point- chronology uncertain.


Lost from flights and fights uncertain in which very
many souls have been withdrawn, and hid beneath their stones
to pass the time I dally with leaves and skulls and berry-
ozzing bottles, uncorked and dripping over bones.
And by a foaming cup I dull the babble
of the lying dead that despise their place together
blown by cold fear like a wind in eddying rabbles
each gibbering its proof that he still will live forever,
and he alone. Far through the trees, rooks
are shaken up into the sky, as old bells speak
of battles heightening in the ruins where once men took
their war with heaven out in brick to build a tower and a keep.
To this riddle an answer I'd obtain
do I desert those fighters most to go or to remain?

Yesterday.

The oldest of brothers blubbered-
but not over his brothers grave-
why can't I fail more freely?
whoever finds me might not like me,
and it's more than I can bear.

Pillar of Cloud

First. Tonight there was thick fog and low clouds. I saw this from the fire escape on the loft. Looking over roofs towards the campus, the fog was lit up into pillars of orange or yellow or blue, wherever there were lights. There was a game at the U of O tonight and the sidewalks were streaming with people, but all sound was hushed and drifted in from far away. Even the saxophone. A bum was playing the saxophone on the street corner, playing, I guess, to the passers-by and the fog.

Second. I looked back over the last few posts, and they don't seem particularly clear to me. It is too much work to edit them. I don't know if this will help.

The problem that has been bothering me the last few weeks is this. How do you forgive people who doesn't think they have a problem? I may not be actually dealing with this situation, but it sure seems like it. One tearful night after much dislike of God, I was forced to admit that you do, in fact, have to forgive them. This is probably painfully obvious, but it occurred to me that Jesus forgave people who were in the process of killing him. You don't get much more unrepentant than that. This was hard to argue against. This is also why Reid (Hoover)'s definition of Christianity struck me- not only because I expected him to be much more verbose than that.

Anyway, that being agreed to, I am still left with the problem of what to do. What does forgiveness even look like if the person doesn't think they need it? Do you embrace them as brothers who God is working on at a different rate and manner? Do you refuse to accept something blatantly wrong? Do you hide in a corner and wait for it all to blow over? What does love look like in a body? No idea.

At any rate. I really wish that all the problems in my life were resolved and that life was all fluffy and pink, but there's no point in even saying that. One time, Nigel Cottier, my German teacher, tried to illustrate German humor for us. He said that in Berlin, the situation maybe serious, but it's never hopeless. In Vienna, the situation may be hopeless, but it's not serious.

I think I may be Viennese at heart.