the Myth of Sisyphus

This book by Albert Camus is one I have read before, but back in the days before I was running this blog - so after having recently read The Rebel, I decided to revisit it. It's a collection of one long (the titular) & five shorter essays - as follows:

• The Myth of Sisyphus: the main focus of this long essay is the problem of suicide, which Camus sees as being the primary, immediate, philosophical question - is life worth living? The title comes from the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to an immortal existence in which he had to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down as soon as this task was completed, and he had to do it all over again - a futile, endless experience, but as Camus concludes, "one must imagine Sisyphus happy". The essay's inner workings are split into four main chunks:
• Absurd reasoning: after explaining the general landscape of existing as a meaning-seeking being in a world apparently lacking definite meaning (a situation Camus calls "the absurd"), this section deals with the limits of rationality in apprehending a meaning to life, the "walls" we encounter in that pursuit, the idea of "philosophical suicide" (that being the circumstance in which thinkers in pursuit of meaning abandon their quests & accept absurdism), and the strange kind of freedom embracing the absurd can bestow upon one.
• The absurd man: three different ways of living in light of the absurd - the absolute pursuit of selfish pleasure, the aesthetic construction of a satisfying drama, and the power-plays of the conqueror.
• Absurd creation: first examining the relationship between philosophy and fiction, then undertaking a deep-dive into Dostoyevsky's character of Kirilov as an example of this done well, before finally looking at the profundity of one's creative effort in light of the absurd.
• Appendix - examines the themes of this essay & how they relate to the tangibility (or lack thereof) of hope in the works of Franz Kafka.
• Summer in Algiers: a reflection on the carefree, childlike aesthetic of life in that city, rooted in an ethic of living bodily & wholeheartedly in the present.
• The Minotaur: a reflection on the city of Oran & how its culture deals with the omnipresent problems of boredom.
• Helen's Exile: a commentary on how western modernism seems to have sacrificed its experience of beauty in favour of constructing a rational future.
• Return to Tipasa: a reflection on how places change when you visit them as an older person to how you enjoyed them as a youth; with a closing exhortation on the importance of holding onto joy.
• The Artist and his Time: ruminations on the vocation of the artist speaking into & acting in history.

   Overall this is a very thought-provoking & life-affirming book. If you're struggling with suicidal thoughts, this might give enough of a reasonable leg-up into confronting the struggle of being with a bit more bravery & stability (though it's far from being the first thing I would recommend to someone in that circumstance); and if you're simply existentially wrestling with the apparent meaninglessness of it all, this perspective from the absurd will almost certainly embolden you to live well despite that. Highly recommended reading for anyone interested in whether life has meaningfulness integrated into it - especially if the notion that it doesn't leaves you feeling lost: here, Camus provides you with a very humane, readable & compelling map.

A Monster Calls

This book is a novel by Patrick Ness (although based on an idea by Siobhan Dowd, who came up with the basic story but died of cancer before she could write it - which makes the book all the more poignant in my opinion) & illustrated beautifully by Jim Kay.*

   In it, thirteen-year-old Conor O'Malley has been having a recurring nightmare in which his mother - who is being treated for cancer** - is taken by a monster and there's nothing he can do to save her. Then one night, he is visited by a new monster, something ancient & wild - purportedly the yew tree from the churchyard his house's rear windows look out upon. The monster tells Conor three stories, and then demands in return that he tells the fourth: specifically, the truth. I won't spoil the plot but that's the broad outline. I really enjoyed this book - it's a kid-friendly (well, between ages eight to fourteen, maybe) exploration of pain & fear & grief told in powerful prose.

* The illustrations are marvellous; scratchy & shadowy, eerie & suggestive, full of interesting textures. They really add a great deal to the atmosphere of the story.

** "The C word" isn't mentioned anywhere in the book, but it's obvious.

Unancestral Voice

This book by Owen Barfield I'm really struggling to categorize... it's ostensibly a novel, with a protagonist, dialogue, and a forwards plot (of sorts), but the entirety of all three of these elements are devoted to philosophical-spiritual explorations in the evolution of consciousness. I'm not going to label it as a novel even though it sort of is, but I think it belongs perhaps more in the realm of a Platonic dialogue.

   We start part one with the main character, a man aptly named Burgeon, debating with a couple of associates about the moral & anthropological implications of D.H. Lawrence's controversial (obscene, some would say) work; while pondering this subconsciously, Burgeon stumbles across a book by an old rabbi named Joseph Karo who spoke of the shekinah and the logos - and soon, though far from a mystic, Burgeon finds himself entertaining an innate-but-somehow-alien voice which he calls Meggid and that starts prompting him to have deep spiritual-philosophical dialogues in his own head.* By part two, these conversations have obviously started rubbing off on Burgeon, and we watch as he engages deeply in a debate with a pair of strangers on a train journey about the spiritual and/or biological nature of life & consciousness, and how evolution & reincarnation fit into a holistic understanding of the very possibility of this. During these chapters Meggid imparts to Burgeon the insight that the transcendent spiritual powers at war for the fate of creation are Gabriel [incarnation of spirit into flesh] & Michael [rebirth through death] on the one hand and Lucifer [obsessive conservation of the past] & Ahriman [destruction to make way for an invented future] on the other. Part three opens, somewhat bafflingly, with an extended lecture (followed by a lively Q&A session) on quantum mechanics - though the next chapter explosively joins the dots between this discussion & metaphysics, neatly tying together with all the loose threads of theological implication strewn throughout the previous chapters. The final chapter is a reflective summation of all that has been learnt by Burgeon and - indeed! - the reader, with spiritual invitations given to lean in with eager faith to the possibilities of transformation of self-consciousness as divulged herein.

   If that sounds like it's trying to do a lot - you'd be absolutely right, and let me assure you here & now that it succeeds marvellously in making its points shockingly accessibly,** as the dialectical format allows you to follow the train-of-thought like a ping-pong rally all the way to its radical conclusion. Which, if I were to try to summarise where this book's argument ends up... so, when William Blake declares that "there is no natural religion", Baruch de Spinoza points irritably at his own system to say "of course there is, look!" only for Jürgen Moltmann to step in with the missing eco-theological key to the Hegelian synthesis (after Nicholas of Cusa politely knocked on the door, of course). To say I found this book illuminating would be a gross understatement - it's made me feel like I've stumbled into an almost gnostic form of orthodoxy that makes perfect sense & yet none simultaneously. Wherever you are on your own spiritual-intellectual journey, if you're comfortable with complex diagonal ideas & verbose rambling tangents, I'm sure you will find much deep & fruitful meat-for-thought in this amazing little book.

* Later in the book Meggid gives the description of itself as "the voice of each one's mind speaking from the depths within themself", a kind of personal (and yet vaguely universal also) divine/organic imagination-cognition-intuition pump, if you will.

** In a nice change from his other book that I've read, all the non-obvious-from-context quotes in Latin or whatever are actually given translations in the endnotes!

Lines on the Surface

This book is a collection of poems written by my good friend* Nicolas Spicer between 1999 and 2009. I've actually owned this book for about five years, and had been putting off reading it because when I read published poetry by people I know personally I do often get quite envious, not simply of their being published, but of their sheer brilliance of style that I would find it impossible to imitate (oh hello Kinsman & Otis) and obviously that isn't emotionally healthy & poets are generally neurotic enough as it is. But we all have our own voice, which is to be celebrated; although additional to mere style, Nick is known to me as something of an oracular genius when it comes to the history & diversity & techniques of poetry, having studied it at length & depth for much of his life in a way I never have, so I am reluctant to say anything critical of this book on here at all for thought that I would be scramblingly failing to articulate the very clever things he is doing with language that I am able to thoroughly enjoy aesthetically without being remotely capable of describing with any expertisemént.** What I will say is that I read this is one two-hour sitting & didn't have a lull of gripped interest throughout: the themes & feelings of these poems are wonderfully varied but the stylistic voice is so strong & consistent throughout that I almost heard his delivery ring in my ears as I read. An expert in the craft - highly recommended collection for poetry lovers.

* He's one of our most reliable (in terms of both consistency of attendance & quality of performance) regulars at Guerrilla, the spoken word night I host. So if you want to experience Nick's excellent poetry live, for free, in a very nice pub, you know where to start seeking the opportunity to do so.

** Not a word, I know. Shut up.

the Sublime Object of Ideology

This book by Slavoj Žižek* was oof! A tricky one, to put it mildly. I went into it knowing that Žižek is a deep & broad thinker & this was his first book so I assumed it would be relatively introductory - I was not prepared for the density of his arguments, his arguable overreliance on Hegelian metaphysics & Lacanian psychoanalysis, his lengthy dissections of what esoteric film references mean in terms of the symbolic phallus, etc. I could not for love nor money explain this book to you, beyond the extremely vague tentative offering that it's an exploration of the subject-object relationship & how this manifests in socio-cultural constructs. If you like a real meaty gristly challenge in your philosophical reading then you might dare to give this a go & see if you can make more sense of it than me - but honestly? This might be the densest, hardest book I've read for this blog ever - harder than Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, harder than Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety, goddamn, harder than Wittgenstein's Tractatus. And so on *sniff* and so on. Woof.

* If you're not familiar - he is probably best described as "the philosopher you would be least surprised to see eat a dropped hotdog off the ground." (after Diogenes, of course.) His book may have left me baffled but I still find him highly entertaining to watch interviews of - he tends to make much easier informative sense in them too.

the Lord of the Rings: book six

This book is the sixth and final instalment of J.R.R. Tolkien's genre-defining fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings, which I've read before on this blog hence that link going back to my original post about it - I've been re-enjoying the series over the past sixty weeks with YouTuber Tolkien Trash reading a chapter a week on livestream, which was (it's over! but she's doing The Hobbit next & then The Silmarillion) a very pleasant experience. It was like an audiobook with a chat feature so you can jest & surmise &etc with other listeners as you go.

the Irresistible Revolution

This book by Shane Claiborne (I read the updated 10th-anniversary edition which has a whole extra chapter full of FAQs) is an autobiographical manifesto of sorts for radically living out the implications of truly following in Jesus Christ's footsteps. As a response to having recently read Camus's The Rebel, and thinking "well, isn't Christianity kind of inherently revolutionary?" I decided to blast through this over the Easter weekend. (Hope you've had a happy one, by the way.) Claiborne takes a refreshingly open-minded big-hearted approach to interpreting the life, ministry & teachings of Jesus - and it leads him to some crazy places. From the slums of Calcutta where he meets Mother Theresa, to Iraq during the war where he was challenged & encouraged by the hospitality of the locals, to his home city of Philadelphia where his intentional communities have done a huge amount to build support networks for the poor & vulnerable - he really has achieved a lot by stepping out in sincere faith, and I think every Christian has a lot to learn from him. Highly recommended book for believers who sense that maybe they could be doing more for the Kingdom - the Church could really use a great deal more prophetic & provocative activity from "holy fools" (his term) like Shane.

The Rebel

This book by Albert Camus I had heard of for years, but always assumed it was a novel, much like The Outsider - which I enjoyed, but it didn't blow me away, so I'd reserved a general apathy towards his other novels. However, since YouTuber unsolicited advice informed me that it was in fact a work of nonfiction - indeed, being a kind of follow-up to The Myth of Sisyphus (which I read before I started this blog but intend to reread soon) - it immediately got shunted to the top of my to-read list.

   While The Myth of Sisyphus famously contends with the philosophical problem of suicide, The Rebel goes on to do so for the existential phenomenon of murder. Camus takes a generous definition of murder - the killing of someone by the state is just as much murder as the killing of someone by someone else, in both cases for whatever given reason. The first chapter is a simple, considerate portrait of 'the rebel' - why does a human rebel, and against what? The second chapter goes on to deal with 'metaphysical rebellion' - that of an individual or group of people rejected the natural order of conditions purportedly ordained by God; his arguments here are some of the most profound insights into the human condition that I have ever read. We live in a world and are told that the God who created it is good, but we perceive things in the world that we feel are unjust - and so we must kill God in our hearts before turning outward to impose, however successfully or arguably reasonably, our own sense of justice onto this broken created order.* Our passion & reason become sublimated to each other. Chilling stuff. Chapter three (being the meat of the book - about 60% of its total length) is about 'historical rebellion'; how, once one has become a metaphysical rebel, their ideas about righteousness & justice coalesce into ideology, which manifests in the direct organization & empowerment of similarly-minded (or convinced, coerced, it matters little in the big picture) rebellious folks into something more - a revolution. Through thorough analysis of the roots, methods, and fallouts of the French 1789 and Russian 1917 revolutions, Camus demonstrates that revolutions can have a nasty tendency to value their own idea of justice above basic respect for the sanctity of God-given life, and will often result in periods of terror - mass murder by the revolutionary state, or whatever power has supplanted that which was revolted against. Chapter four explores how artistic expression can be a means of & model for rebellion; he gives particular attention to the form of the novel as a way by which a creative mind can construct its own distinct, 'good', world. A final chapter then loosely ties up a handful of tangents touched upon in the previous four with a few extra reflections.

   Overall I found this to be a tremendously politically & religiously humbling book. It gave me a series of mounting epiphanies which forced me to re-evaluate much of my own ideological positions & how dangerous they might be in power. Though as a Christian obviously the concept of metaphysical rebellion is far from alien to me - but having an existentialist philosopher of immense intellectual sharpness talk about it is a heck of a smack different to having an orthodox theologian talk about it in digestible biblical terms. Anyone interested in the human condition, how freedom & violence interrelate, the ecology of political ideas & the ethics of murder - will get a great deal to chew on from this book. Highly recommended.

* This concept as developed here existentially by Camus actually maps really quite neatly onto the 'royal consciousness' concept Walter Brueggemann developed theologically.