The Myth of Sisyphus
““With rebellion, awareness is born.””
You and all of existence meet up in a coffee shop. Existence got there before you and is immaculately dressed. You have got your serious underpants on. You came here for answers and you’re not leaving until you are satisfied.
You ask what it’s all about, what it all means and what it’s all for. Existence is not just quiet; it isn’t even ignoring you because that would indicate it acknowledges that you’re even there. Existence is completely indifferent. So, what do you do?
You give great passionate speeches, complex intellectual and philosophical arguments. Nothing. You beg, plead, and promise anything, everything for a response. Nothing. You rant and rage at the unfairness, the obscurity, the complexity, and the hypocrisy. Nothing. You sulk, you complain, you weep over the personal affront, the insult. You try resentment, try giving up in resignation, try blaming yourself and give assurances you can do better. You blame yourself, your situation, and finally existence itself before denying it has any power at all and taunting it to demonstrate its power, even if it means destroying you.
Nothing.
With Existence providing no defined meaning, you are left with the freedom to do anything to get or make up an answer. On the one hand, anything is possible, but frighteningly you realise that this also means everything is possible. Anything or nothing or both could be the answer, so what good is the freedom to find your own? Albert Camus sits at a table nearby looking oh-so pre-WWII cool, so you sit yourself down and complain to him. Annoyingly, he replies by telling you an allegory.
Itsy-bitsy was a spider who every day climbed a slippery waterspout. Every day the rain came and washed it back to the bottom of the pipe. When the rain stops, the spider climbed again; same pipe, same chance of rain, fully aware of the potential outcome occurring, persevering regardless of pointlessness.
You stare at him, thinking how much Freud would make of the imagery and with a of patronising air, you tell Camus the story he is supposed to know.
Sisyphus was a Greek prince and a complete asshole. He tried to kill and dethrone his brother, seduced his niece, snitched on Zeus and tricked Hades into escaping the underworld to prolong his own life. After he was finally dragged to hell in chains by Hermes, his punishment was to push a rock up a hill, only to have it roll down the other side and force him to begin the pointless task all over again for all of eternity.
Camus sits back to connect the dots. Searching for meaning from existence is like a spoiled prince wanting more of everything stuck carrying the burden of their questions and ignorance through a meaningless act, only for the process to repeat itself from the beginning again. “Pretty bleak theme to imprint on babies in a nursery rhyme,” you say.
“But,” says Camus, “one must imagine Sisyphus as happy…”
“But the rock just rolls down the hill again! How could he be happy?” Your empathy for a mythical figure is admirable.
“Because that keeps everything going. What would happen if the rock was carried up the mountain and just stayed up there?” Camus says with a Humphrey Bogart smile. “The Gods’ goal was to make Sisyphus carry the rock to the top, but what if Sisyphus’ goal was instead getting it to the point where it would roll down in the best possible way?”
“It’s just a rock!” you say in the way of reductionists throughout history.
“The very basis on which we stand. It has gravity and importance, but it is also ubiquitous. The weightiest of ideals, the most mundane object. The thing we strive for even though we can find it anywhere, and the thing we drag behind us. In the process of getting up the hill and watching it roll down, would there be any difference if the rock was diamond or clay?”
“The point is that it’s pointless,” Jean Paul Sartre interrupts from the next table where he sits with Simone De Beauvoir. “We struggle, suffer under our burdens in a life who’s only meaning is thrust upon us by others.”
“Carrying the rock and watching it roll are just activities.” Camus says in a tone suggesting a well-worn argument. “The meaning is what you prescribe to them.”
“What other meaning could you give this task but misery, punishment, and tedium?” Sartre scoffs. “If there is a sin against life it consists not so much in despairing as in hoping.”
“That’s Sisyphus’ choice.” Camus smiles infuriatingly. “He could see it as exercise, meditation or delight in the spectacle of weight and gravity as the rock tumbles down. He could love the rock and wants to show it the view from the top of the mountain, even if for just one second at a time. Perhaps he could simply think “This is mine”, or even more simply and stoically, “This is.”
“We do see the world as it actually is,” De Beauvoir says, interrupting the pissing contest, “exactly how man makes it. Finding balance between self and the imposed identity, seeking lucidity rather than meaning, this is how we see life.”
“Life is not about balance,” Camus says with all the certainty of a French poet. “Balance is stilling something dynamic, neither one nor the other, or any resistance between. It is not the solution to a dialectic of ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
“Why do we always feel that every problem must have an answer?” he continues pontificating. “I say it is absurd to seek meaning where there is none and people are compelled to ask why this is so! What if finding meaning was not the goal? Or finding no meaning was the goal. Or both? Or neither?
“There are unknowns that are destined to remain unknown, but the challenge is that we must live in that uncomfortable place of not knowing, and not being in control.”
“In the face of this absurdity, some choose to give in to the meaninglessness.” Camus gestures with his cigarette to the Existentialists’ table, both of whom look simultaneously angry and depressed. “I choose to rebel.” He drops his cigarette into his empty coffee cup, makes a vulgar hand gesture to Existence and chuckling to himself, strolls off into the Parisian morning.
Existence doesn’t seem to notice. Its mind must be elsewhere.
