Red Cedar

I haven’t got much to say as we round out towards Christmas, except am I ever ready for holidays. Energy levels have been low this week, and post-cold, my sinuses are acting up again. I just need a few days of sleeping in and not having to rush around… which starts on Boxing Day for me since everything up until then looks something like – clean house, travel (surrey), eat, presents, sleep, travel (victoria), presents, eat, visit.  Between being blended family with split-time over the holiday, and the fact that B. and I have families on the island, there is a lot of running around that gets done at this time of year. At least this year B’s parents are coming down to Victoria to have dinner at my parents’ house.

From the tracking notice I got in my email this morning, it looks like my purple yarns will be here this afternoon – which also means that in addition to school reading, I will have a crochet project to take along during our travels. I’ve also been doing some cross-stitch again recently, and have a small redwork project in mind that might end up in my traveling bag. The sewing has really been at a lull recently, but I’m hoping that finishing up a sweater for a friend (just got it cut this morning before work) will inspire me back to the machine as the holiday passes. I have been feeling guilty about working on things for myself when a part of my feels that I should be working on things for other people: hence, working on nothing is the solution.

Christmas is such a weird time of year – so stressful and frenetic, which is the opposite of what you hope a holiday will be. I guess that the time in between Christmas and New Years is the real holiday…. I always grit my teeth until the 26th and only then do I feel the ability to relax. And I’m not even the one cooking a holiday dinner!

Anyhow, I’m not sure how much posting will happen here over the holidays, so I’ll just wish y’all a good season right now. The light is finally on its return, which means we’re through the darkest days once again!

I had to take a schwack of advil this morning to deal with some sinus pain and that has left me without much to say this afternoon – so instead I present to you my favourite ornament on the festive branch: The Dancing Girl. I bought her for $3.75 at The Bay in 2007 to attach to the first present I ever gave Brian (a beautiful cloth-bound 1947 edition of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman). She is hard plastic and a little heavy for the branch, but she has a long, fringey-skirt and there is something amazingly retro about her. It still seems a fluke to me that something so cool could have been for sale at The Bay. A little like how I ended up married to someone I met on Craigslist. Awesome and strange being hallmarks of my existence — the Dancing Girl is perhaps just emblematic.

I shook off my sweat, and the clinging veil of light. I knew I’d shattered the balance of the day, the spacious calm of this beach on which I had been happy. But I fired four shots more into the inert body, on which they left no visible trace. And each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing.

The Stranger by Albert Camus is one of those books that made the rounds in high school, was a part of my 80s pop culture referencing (“Killing an Arab” by The Cure ring a bell?) and is only 100 pages long. Yet somehow I have only now come to read it – this brief and beautiful work. Though frequently classified as an existentialist work, Camus himself denied that label, preferring the philosophy of absurdism which maintains that efforts to find meaning in human life are absurd (and will fail) because certainty is impossible. Accordingly there are three possible actions to be taken in response to this lack of ability to know the meaning of life

1. Suicide (which Camus rejected)
2. Transcendant belief (as per Kierkegaard) or
3. Acceptance of the absurd and a continuation of life with this knowledge – this was Camus’ approach.

As much as The Stranger (also translated at The Outsider) explores this third approach to the absurdity of life, the main character (Mersault) somehow misses this third option, instead opting for a form of suicide through the senseless murder of “the Arab” (which removes him from sensory pleasures and ultimately gives the state leave to execute him).

To some degree I am with Camus on this one, the ultimate meaning of life is unknowable – but in order to continue without descending into a kind of self-absorbed individualism, or nihilism we are responsible for finding meaning in interaction and experience. And in fact, recent studies show that individuals find their greatest happiness in relationships, in volunteering or caring for others, in spiritual engagement, in project-oriented goals, and in pursuing goals that are greater than the self.  While we shouldn’t conflate the pursuit of happiness with the meaning of life, the field of positive psychology is establishing that a large part of the “good life” (particularly once core material needs are met) is found in the ability to find meaning in our day-to-day activities and relationships.

This is essentially the stuff that Mersault seems unable to do – while he recognizes the aburdity or “pointlessness” of it all – he is unable to find meaning in his relationships, in goals, in religion, and thus is utterly disconnected from his society (a stranger, an outsider – the prosecutor in the murder trial accuses him of having no place among the normal moral mentality of humanity).

Of his mother’s death he says: “It occurred to me that somehow I’d got through another Sunday, that Mother now was buried, and tomorrow I’d be going back to work as usual. Really, nothing in my life had changed.”

Of his lover: “A moment later she asked me if I really loved her. I said that sort of question had no meaning, really; but I supposed I didn’t.”

Of work ambition: “I answered that one never changed his way of life; one life was as good as another, and my present one suited me quite well….. As a student I’d had plenty of ambition of the kind he meant. But, when I had to drop my studies, I very soon realized all that was pretty futile.”

Of the murder: “”And just then it crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire — and it would come to absolutely the same thing.”

In each of these statements is the recognition that there either is a grand design and thus Mersault is powerless to it, or there is no grand design and thus none of what he does has much consequence. He is candid with the court system and himself that he does not feel much emotion for anything, doesn’t have time for emotion – and at one point says of his trial “the prospect of witnessing a trial rather interested me, I’d never had occasion to attend one before” – in effect casting himself as an observer on his own life.

But as unaffected as he seems about these matters, he does not seem to recognize that he does place great meaning (and derive great pleasure from) his sensory experiences, particularly in nature. It is in these passages that we locate the emotional resonance of Mersault – that which is truly important to him:

“Only one incident stands out; toward the end, while my counsel rambled on, I heard the tin trumpet of an ice-cream vendor in the street, a small, shrill sound cutting across the flow of words. And then a rush of memories went through my mind — memories of a life which was mine no longer and had once provided me with the surest, humblest pleasures: warm smells of summer, my favorite streets, the sky at evening, Marie’s dresses and her laugh. The futility of what was happening here seemed to take me by the throat, I felt like vomiting, and I had only one idea: to get it over, to go back to my cell, and sleep…. and sleep.”

In this passage, he is overwhelmed by the sensory memories to the degree that he must put a stop to them through sleep – something that he engages in with increasing frequency after his incarceration (sometimes sleeping 16-18 hours per day). As much as Mersault maintains that nothing matters, that nothing changes either way, that nothing has much impact in the long run – it is after his imprisonment that he is (to some degree) awakened to the fact that there are things that matter, at least in the sensory immediate:

“Still, there was one thing in those early days that was really irksome: my habit of thinking like a free man. For instance, I would suddenly be seized with a desire to go down to the beach for a swim. And merely to have imagined the sound of ripples at my feet, the smooth feel of the water on my body as I struck out, and the wonderful sensation of relief it gave brought home still more cruelly the narrowness of my cell.”

We might interpret the act of killing the Arab on the beach is an act of nihilism, which Camus does not approve of. Ultimately this senseless act removes Mersault from his only meaning (sensory experience), plunging him into a state of sensory deprivation (a dark prison cell) – and thus removing the only location in which he finds meaning. And although he ultimately comes to accept his death as a  meaningless but good death (particularly if crowds came out to watch it), one doesn’t believe that this is the right answer to the “absurdity” of the human condition. It is certainly *an* answer, but there are too many cracks in the facade of Mersault for us to see him as totally unaffected. His sensory reminiscences allow for the recognition that at least on some level he has experienced a glimmer of personal meeting in life, despite his protestations.

And in case you don’t know it – here is The Cure’s 1978 video for “Killing an Arab”:

How had I failed to recognize that nothing was more important than an execution; that, viewed from one angle it’s the only thing that can ever genuinely interest a man?