Stars

There are certain instances in which we choose not to distract ourselves with petty things and look upward to see what is or what is not there.

What we often see—unless clouds obscure our view—is a dark night sky sprinkled with stars. Throughout history, we have decided to force meaning upon their relative positions in the sky. We call these illusory patterns "constellations," many of which honor animals or gods we have constructed to give our lives purpose. Now, of course, we understand that these patterns are inherently meaningless. They are merely projections of visible light located at different distances in space. If we were to alter our vantage point and raise our heads once again, new patterns would emerge. And in our insatiable thirst for coherence, we would construct new patterns to give meaning where none exists. And so it goes with the gods we honor, though in this case our vantage point is one of time rather than space.

Our vantage points in both time and space—united in theory but distinct in practice—are limited and will continue to be so. This does not prevent us from thumping our chests and viewing our place in the universe through the prism of ignorance. The trees—plants made for us so that we may breathe. The water—substance given to us to nourish and heal. The stars—a work of art painted by the hands of a higher being.

And since the trees and the water and everything else were created to serve our purpose, we therefore have every right to use them up and discard them as we please. And so we do, giving little thought to the consequences.

But the stars have no interest in our petty concerns. They look down as we struggle against one another, mocking us with their false patterns and making light of our transgressions. And long after we have extinguished ourselves, they will continue to burn, patternless, as the random dots they are, as the random dots they shall always be.

The Kings of Convenience

Last night I found myself listening to the Kings of Convenience again. We all have artists who are special to us. We may set them aside for months or even years, but we always come back to them. They're like an old friend we don't hear from for months on end. But when we get that call or make that lunch date, everything falls into place. I know this is how it is with many of my old friends, and we don't mind things being this way.

I first discovered the Kings of Convenience back in 2006 through Shilough Hopwood, who is in a band out of Pennsylvania called Honeychurch. His band, by the way, has an amazing album called Makes Me Feel Better, which is one of my favorites. My favorite time to listen to this album is on cold winter nights as I drive home from work. It beautifully harmonizes with a pink December sky and an empty, snow-covered highway.

Shilough and I corresponded a few times on MySpace, and he mentioned some of his musical influences. One of the bands he mentioned was the Kings of Convenience, and since I noticed we had similar musical tastes, I decided to check them out. This was a good decision.

Erlend and Eirek beautifully complement one other. Their voices blend together so perfectly that I often have difficulty figuring out if Erlend or Eirek is singing the high part. Their vocal harmonies and restrained acoustic guitar arrangements are uniquely powerful, and they allow me to intricately couple past moments in a collage of memory and melody.

To put it strangely, their music is a certain form of silence, in my opinion. And like silence, it maintains a power that lurks in the spaces between sounds. When I play one of their albums, it is as if I no longer inhabit time, and I am no longer history's slave, burdened by such concepts as "action" and "progress." It is a fleeting period of pure contemplation, in which I rely on memory and melody alone to sustain me. Mystics might call this phenomenon "ecstasy," and perhaps this word is most fitting.

I remember the first time I listened to their remake of a-ha's "Manhattan Skyline." I felt like I was saying goodbye to a close friend, which I have done from time to time. A few winters ago, I said goodbye to a friend I thought I would see again, but I must have misjudged the moment. We haven't spoken since, and I have no reason why. This song reminds me that sometimes goodbyes can be strange and sad; other times they can be happy or even hopeful. But regardless of the nature of the goodbye, we are not necessarily granted the satisfaction of knowing we are surrounded by order and harmony. All too often we are not, and things don't make sense.

But even if things don't make sense, we always have musicians like the Kings of Convenience and Honeychurch to bring clarity to moments that aren't very clear. Music is a way to gain insight into deeper truths that escape the logic of our everyday lives, an idea that Arthur Schopenhauer understood very well.

The Kings of Convenience's latest album, Declaration of Dependence, is a brilliant exercise in minimalism. It also taps many of the themes I come across in my own reading and writing. I often find that I am drawn to works of art—or even people—who loosely fit into a broader context in my life. And this is why life makes the most sense—in other words, it is the least senseless—when I view it as an ongoing project in which I pull together people and works of art that give my life a certain coherence. The project might end when we die, or it might continue through the work of others. For example, when I refer to Schopenhauer, his project continues in spite of his absence. As an atheist, this is the best meaning of eternity I can give.

When my grandmother was dying, I listened to Neil Halstead's Oh! Mighty Engine in the middle of the night by her bedside. Now, whenever I play the album, I think of her and what she meant to me. I don't exactly know where Declaration of Dependence fits into my life's soundtrack. But I'm not anxious for an answer; sometimes there isn't one.

Meditation on the Corpse

Our communion with the corpse is an interrogation of sorts, and the one on the receiving end of our tears is the mirror by which we glimpse the endpoint of our incessant flailing.

Ashamed by the prospect of an undignified death, we present ourselves before the casket to deliver a proper farewell. Some wear veils to shield their eyes from those who see in them the hint of latent decay.

We spend eight or so decades in protest, caught up in every cause but the one that has meaning. And in the eyes of the corpse we see ourselves, asking the questions we bury with distractions. How we choose to answer them is largely up to us, though the endpoint is always the same.

Ours is a slow funereal procession, one marked by words and gestures that do little to prepare us for our eternal dialogue with the coffin. It would do us some good to assume the supine from time to time, if only to grow accustomed to the position we will take upon severing ties with the flesh.

Sink

What is this structure that assumes our ills, indiscriminate and efficient in its execution? It treats tears and phlegm alike—as substance to be swallowed. Rushed off in a liquid torrent, the substance disappears into the void without the dignity of a proper farewell. It descends into the darkness, left alone to travel through the channels that lead it to its final home. But to us, its disappearance is nothing more than a foregone conclusion, one we forget with a splash of water to the face.

In casting off the signs of our humanity and leaving them for the sink, we do all we can to deny our status as creatures fashioned in the likeness of an inferior god. We might ponder a separate universe in which there is no need for a sink to do the dirty work for us.

At times the sink grows tired of its submissive role, vomiting up the Other we tried to forget. The plumber's duty is to quell this upwelling of congealed history, which reappears as an amorphous blob of human hair that thoroughly affronts us.

History is not a linear progression. Seeking its program in the imitation of the sink, it is nothing more than a chain of periodic protests by the Other—those forgotten events embedded in time that reappear in altered form, though no less revolting. History's disease is beyond the scope of the plumber, and an ill of which no sink is suited to dispose.

Silence

Humankind's preoccupation with all things auditory is particularly odious, and so I do my part to engage in vague protest. It is an indistinct but necessary engagement. Regardless of its true efficacy, it calms the nerves and combats the insipidity of oscillating air.

In the streets this sensory molestation festers, welling up between the curbs, protesting the inevitability of its existential nadir. What shall we do to shield ourselves from its torrent?

Birth is certainly not an act that signals the commencement of this exercise in negation. We enter with a scream deemed to mark the healthy beginning of a long slow fall. Evidently, it takes conscious and exerted effort to overcome our first mistake, and many are not up to the task.

I find repose in my bastion of silence: four walls that mitigate the effects of unwelcome aural stimulation. But there are times we must venture the world on the outside, bathed by the white noise that betrays humankind's vacuity. We must come face to face with flesh-covered corpses, too distracted by the act of modulation to understand the meaning of a sigh.

There are few things more damning to our kind than the oral contortions of the populace, and there is no response more fitting than no response at all.

We might imagine a world content in its own verbal abstention, an existence anterior to the genesis of consonants and vowels, where words are wholly inadequate for the task at hand. In short, a world where there is no atmosphere left for us to stir. In silence alone we shed all complicity in our gradual decline, a fact lost on all but the stillborn.

On Suicide

Albert Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus that the only "truly philosophical problem" is that of suicide. And here we are—more than half a century later—pondering the same question, rolling the same rock up the same tired hill. But rather than revolt against the absurd as Camus consciously chose to do (who does that anymore?), we pose the question in a more sterile form: Should one have the legal right to take one's own life under the care of a physician? In time we will answer this question.

But buried beneath the surface is a more fundamental concern: Who owns us? There are various ways in which institutions own us. Through the draft the state determines who shall fight for such ideals as honor and justice. Never mind, however, that the interpretation of such ideals heavily depends on who is spouting them. Through faith and fear of hell the church presents the proper mode of living. Never mind, however, that the proper mode one "chooses" heavily depends on the accident of birth. And by framing the argument in terms of physician-assisted suicide, the state decides that our lives are not our own. Unless, perhaps, we are too ill to march and too fatigued to fear. And by acting in like manner, we are all complicit in perpetuating this assumption.

In answering questions of morality, we should consider the ways in which our actions reduce human suffering rather than adhere to rules rooted in superstition and tradition. The question is neither one of national honor—a mutable and hence meaningless abstraction—nor one of religious faith. Rather, it is one of freedom. Freedom to act in accordance with our own principles and values insofar as such actions do no harm to others.

From a young age we are taught to walk in a straight line and view belief sans evidence as a virtue. But in a world of myriad faiths, who shall choose which line is straight? At the moment it is those who hold power and work hard to keep it.

Camus died tragically in a car accident carrying with him the unfinished manuscript that would become his posthumous novel, The First Man. It is the account of one man's memories of sea and sun, a testimony of life as a work of art consciously created on one's own terms. In fact we are all in the midst of creating great works of art. And like Camus' manuscript, these works remain unfinished. And thus the final question: How hard will we fight to make them our own?

Works discussed in this piece:

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by Justin O'Brien. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

———. The First Man. Translated by David Hapgood. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.

Gauloises and Silence

I am making my way through Albert Camus' The Fall again. I read it a few years ago, which resulted in a trip to Amsterdam in December 2007. The book is a gem, and I will reproduce one insightful passage here, appended with my comments:

Something must happen—and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!

The character speaking is Jean-Baptiste Clemence, and this self-described "judge-penitent" is issuing a confession on our behalf. The passage above reminds me of a theme that runs through Emil Cioran's work. That is, we are slaves of history—shackled in time and condemned to fits of action. The substance of this action is rather immaterial, so long as we are doing something. The following, an excerpt of a piece called "Nonsense" from Cioran's book On the Heights of Despair, is one example among many of his view of history and the "human commitments" of which Clemence speaks:

When the ticking of a watch breaks the silence of eternity, arousing you out of serene contemplation, how can you help resenting the absurdity of time, its march into the future, and all the nonsense about evolution and progress? Why go forward, why live in time?

And these words from All Gall Is Divided, in which Cioran directly confronts humankind's incessant flailing:

If History had a goal, how lamentable would be the fate of those who have accomplished nothing! But in the universal purposelessness, we stand proud, ineffectual streetwalkers, riffraff well-pleased with having been right.

Camus, of course, traffics in the absurd, and it is interesting to note how his and Cioran's responses differ. Camus believes in existential revolt, perhaps most clearly outlined in The Myth of Sisyphus. Cioran, on the other hand, assumes a less active role, choosing instead to contemplate, among other things, a return to the unborn state.

Arthur Schopenhauer also has some words to say in Parerga concerning our need for things to happen:

Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive within. Contrarily, if they are active within, they do not care to be dragged out of themselves; it disturbs and impedes their thoughts in a way that is often most ruinous to them.

There is clearly a pessimistic strain in the work of Camus, Cioran, and Schopenhauer, but this pessimism does not necessarily signal defeat. Ultimately, the choice of response is ours. How will we choose to craft a life in direct opposition to the absurd? Perhaps we first need to redefine what constitutes action, as Cioran does in The Trouble with Being Born:

In the days when I set off on month-long bicycle trips across France, my greatest pleasure was to stop in country cemeteries, to stretch out between two graves, and to smoke for hours on end. I think of those days as the most active period of my life.

Perhaps there will come a day when we no longer feel the need for something to happen, when we are content with the smoke of a Gauloise bathed in silence.

Works discussed in this piece:

Camus, Albert. The Fall. Translated by Justin O'Brien. New York: Vintage Books, 1956.

———. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by Justin O'Brien. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

Cioran, E. M. All Gall Is Divided. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Arcade, 1999.

———. On the Heights of Despair. Translated by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

———. The Trouble with Being Born. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Arcade, 1998.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. Suffering, Suicide and Immortality. Translated and edited by T. Bailey Saunders. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2006.