oBJecTiViSt MoNSTeRS

Permission Granted by Darwin Leon
www.darwinleon.com

We should pause in our tracks from time to time, take a look over our shoulders, and praise our fear, for fear, before all, is behind our survival. Fear brings life home to us, makes us feel alive, does it not? Horrified at the prospect of being consumed, some folks are paralyzed in place and become easy prey for whatever eats at them, but most people are willing to take a few calculated risks. Indeed, some gamblers love a good challenge and will go out of their way to find one. Adventurers may have some treasure in mind, yet treasure is often just an excuse for getting out and about and making a run for it. And foolhardy dare-devils make no bones about it: they stake their lives for intense short-term thills. Of course, the run-of-the-mill person would rather have a more secure existence, so he turns to virtual threats for vicarious kicks. The seemingly most secure man, the bug snug in a rug, is the most frightened man; but he is not therefore the liveliest, for he has managed to smother his native fear and his natural livelihood with a safety blanket. Thus, when not preoccupied with his occupation, which is all too often repetitive, redundant and stultifying, he vicariously enjoys the threats of sports, horror shows, violent movies, bloody news films, a home video of someone actually being eaten by a shark or someone being mauled by a bear, and so on. Yes, he may even enjoy sublime, awesome art--"sublime" because the awful truth is experienced at a safe distance. The amusements are part of his electric security blanket. They give him temporary frights, providing him with vicarious fight or flight reactions while diverting his attention from his utter helplessness. His electric blanket gives him a jolt, negatively conditioning him to keep up the status quo, and also provides him with a warm feeling. The Grim Reaper has somehow been set aside in brackets for the time being: the victim is in the safe hands of political leaders, corporate executives, football coaches and film directors. Yet enough anxiety remains for him to maintain his status as a productive consumer; he remains dimly aware that he has delegated his freedom to those who are taking big risks with his life as he obediently conforms to the artificial social system established as a precarious bulwark against the so-called laws of evolution--particularly the survival of the fittest. His feelings struggle against himself but he does not struggle with the head gorillas and their charges who own and operate the Electric Blanket & Fence Company. Well, then, all is well, is it not? Natural selection and the brutal struggle for existence of the Wild have been temporarily held at bay within civilization's cultivated compound. Peace prevails within the borders of the most highly developed nations. But all is not as well as it might seem. Multiplication, the population explosion, may eventually bring the artificial scheme to ruin; Malthusian stock has been in the dumps for quite awhile, but beware: numbers do not lie; in the long run, pessimism unheeded may work to our long-term disadvantage. Yet there is another threat to our existence as we turn the globe into our gigantic bee hive, a threat as pressing as the population explosion, the threat that conformity will rob us of the individual vitality and flexibility necessary to our survival. This threat is the source of the post-modern, pervasive fear which the obedient man smothers with the mass illusions of security propagated by those authorities whose anachronistic personal interests are served by continued massive obedience. In that context, the vicarious enjoyment of violent struggles presented in the media owned and operated by the power elite, together with massive consumption of drugs, including alcohol and nicotine, along with the constant multiplication of consumer goods and services, dissipates animosity and deflects attention away from the exercise of the natural individual rights hawked as formal palaver in independence declarations. For a really frightening experience, all one has to do is see through the two-dimensional illusions that makes conformity so graphically entertaining. But that effort would involve a third eye or dimension of in-depth thinking, which requires the bogged-down flatlander to revive his holy free spirit, crawl out of the media morass, and, like an aardvark, dig his own homely burrow with enough space at the end to turn around in--aardvarks prefer not to back out of things. Instead, it is more convenient to let the oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeR dig a mass grave for us with its totally controlled bulldozer while we sleep the sleep of the sleep-walking dead, the sort of sleep we see in zombies lined up at the Red Pop machine for another fix. Yes, oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeR. We have good reason for being paranoid providing we have an object to fear. Unfortunately, it is not always that easy to identify members of the power elite; even if they were identified and exiled, others would circulate into their swank chairs as the national anthem plays on. Besides, we should feel sorry for powerful people, for the rich and famous; we should have a Society to Befriend the Rich and Famous; we should do our best to free them from the anti-social alienation making us all so miserable. Forgive them, for those poor souls have been propagating so long they have become victims of their own propaganda. No, ma'am, we do not require a reprehensible campaign of personal destruction. We need an unnatural collective object for our demonstration. We need a "showing" or a "warning," therefore a monstrosity to "monitor"; ideally, we need an oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeR to frighten us and bring us back to life. How shall we recognize an oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeR? Hopefully its gruesome features will become obvious in due course. Since we are just awakening from a deep sleep, we can only adumbrate them here. Even now the aspects are hideous enough--let us spare children the horrid details until we gain the gall to address them. In fact, it will behoove us to resort to hygienic abstractions as we approach the oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeR, lest we get sucked into the horrid swamp where it replicates itself like a virus in its unwitting hosts. Now then: if I remain in Flatland, it is my personal opinion that any number of points less than three destroys the triangle and leaves us either with the invisible line or just a non-dimensional point. We can think abstractly about these, but only after we have experienced the visible surface. Psychological reality requires the knowing Subject as well as the Object of knowledge, together with consciousness or the active Relation between Subject and Object. A thinker who does not include the entire Trinity in his equation for reality has created a monster. He has in fact made a monster out of himself, if he is what he thinks. The oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeR, often mistaken for a FeNOMenalist FrEEk, not to be confused with the MANiacal SUBjectivist, is primarily interested in the Object as determined by impersonal systems of objective relations. Therefore the oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeR has eaten the willing Subject alive in order to be "objective." Having cannibalized the Subject, the oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeR has come to believe that objects are actually determined by systems rather than by willing subjects. Therefore, the oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeR, in its zeal to become the very objects it loves, worships the impersonal systems--impersonal because the oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeR no longer thinks it is a willing subject but thinks it is an object having a curious reflexive interest, namely its functions, as it fit into the general scheme of things like a cog in a machine. Nonetheless, as the oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeR devises its systemic schemes to manipulate people as if they were objects instead of subjects, it is dimly aware of its bad faith or hypocrisy. For, as anyone subordinated to its systems can see, the oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeR is really a willful subject, and a very frightened subject indeed. That is not to say it should go to the opposite pole and become a MANiacal SUBjectivist. The oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeR is deathly afraid of the freedom of the Subject. Even chaos must be predictable to it, as if chaos were, oxymoronically, a system. The oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeR is a paranoid control-freak who thinks it is being persecuted by the very objects it is manipulating, which is just the inverted aspect of the delusion of grandeur it is completely unaware of because of the unwitting subjection of its subjective identity to the objects in its respective systems. That is to say, the oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeR is a systematic conformer to its own damned system. Believe it or not, the oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeR has replicated itself in human society and has taken command over the mental functions of hordes of people; that certainly bodes ill for the human race. Of course, any society is conformist to a certain extent. Ants, termites, and bees thrive on total conformity, on blind obedience to nature, but humans do not. We have basic needs motivating us, but self-conscious freedom is our greatest virtue. We are each, in a sense, a born criminal: good is rooted in evil as it flies heavenward; moreover, our progress depends on the evil preceding its advance. Furthermore, our progress depends on our intentional violation of the so-called laws of evolution as we restrict, within our cultivated garden, the struggle for existence: we intentionally select what is good for us and weed out the rest. Yet we do not cooperate with each other to conform to a hive-like regimen or even an ape-like regime; we do not blindly obey the objective laws of nature. We must keep this mind as the oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeR strives to turn our society into the latest model of a machine: conformity in itself does not serve our best interests either as individuals or as a human society. Our success has been in learning to voluntarily or willfully cooperate rather than to obediently conform to some monstrous system--and all the systems have been monstrous to date, including the current myths of the social scientists. We cooperate to obtain our selfish ends as individuals. Those selfish ends do coincide and are, by virtue of voluntary cooperation, our highest mutual purpose. That purpose is partially realized on Earth when Earth is treated as our common treasury and natural space ship; but without the transcendental subjective interest, men will destroy each other and their world for its objects. Matter and spirit are poles of a continuum, one the prerequisite of the other, neither having priority without the human perspective. Given that human interest, if we are to bring heaven to Earth or raise Earth to heaven, spirit must have priority. Therefore our supreme ideal is really a spiritual home, not a bee hive or termite mound. If we go inward, we can indeed go onward and upward to where no man had gone before. But the oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeR has been set loose upon the world. Hence there has been a warrant out for the arrest of each and every one of us. In absentia, we have been tried and convicted during our flight from prosecution. The interlocking cells of conformity are being replicated for our occupancy at this very moment. The global prisons being erected by the oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeR are filled with zombies, each one under the single-minded eye of his own monitor. How is this possible? Because prison is being presented as freedom: it is a trap. We must beware of the oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeR. Yet we dare not stab, stake, impale, behead, electrocute, or lethally inject it, for that would kill the patient. Yes, the oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeR is a model for many. All one has to do to see that oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeRS are legion is to gaze into his own broken mirror--broken by the disunity of perspectives caused by the viral infection. Simply getting rid of the mirror will not help: hypocrites have already tried that to rid themselves of guilt, and with fatal consequences. Nowadays the oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeR would merge Subject with objects and diffuse the soul into infinite multiplicity. But do not despair: something can be done to avert the monstrous attempt to collapse the Trinity into one of its moments pulverized into atoms, instead of giving due credit to all three in One. Everyone can look into the fractured mirror and ask, Are you all you can be? Not merely as many, but as the One in many? Beware of the oBJeCTiViST MoNSTeR!

Maya

Maya is a mighty touchy subject, difficult if not impossible to comprehend. "By his powers of maya, Indra goes around in many forms." Alas, the heroic warrior-god Indra was not the only god with mayic powers. He supplanted the magnificent mayin, Varuna, god of justice and order, the guardian of fertile waters who had stood in the firmament and used his mayic power to measure out the earth, as it were, with a measuring stick - estimated to be about a yard long. And Indra himself would eventually be demoted to a relatively minor status within the pantheon.

The term 'maya' is derived from 'ma', meaning, to measure out, that which measures out and limits. Hence maya is the power of measurement. Man refers to his own mayic power with the term 'manu' or 'man', meaning, he who measures out thought - a mother or mama measures out creation - her children. As Protagoras said, Man is the measure of all things, those that are, that they are, those that are not, that they are not; but Protagoras did not mean that subjective individuals are mayins or that man is the creator of the objective universe. The meaning of abstract maya is threefold: in maya we have a trinity: creative power, creating, creation. That is, the Maker, Making, Made. Or, Cause, Force, Effect.

Now we recall that some time after Varuna measured out the creation, Vrita the river-dragon had a considerable power of his own - the power of envelopment. Vrita seized the fertile rivers from their guardian Varuna and holed up with the treasure in his ninety-nine fortresses. Indra - properly known as the truth that makes the knowers of it immune from punishment no matter what they do - got drunk on soma and slew Vrita with a thunderbolt. Wherefore the just and sometimes merciful Varuna was demoted because he had failed to personally keep the rivers within their beds. Varuna - a white man in golden armor seen riding a sea-monster and carrying snake-lasso - would henceforth be a sort of watchman over the rivers and oceans, while Indra lorded it over the creation. Indra would eventually have to make way for Visnu and Siva - Indra was demoted to preside over lesser gods and over the weather.

Individual men have reason to believe that they own maya and are therefore able to craft creation as they wish. On second thought, we have sufficient cause to believe that maya is not possessed by men but that men are possessed by maya. Indeed, Maya's fools are infinite in number. Even wise men have died in vain attempts to define maya. Just last week, two sages were mortally wounded when their dispute over maya's true nature came to blows. They had agreed, first of all, that maya was god's power, and that it was indescribable. But then they tried to describe it, and got into a heated argument over whether or not maya can be terminated by right knowledge; whether or not it has a beginning; whether or not it both projects and veils the universe; whether or not it is the nature of existence; whether it is in the individual or the absolute or in both. And finally, they disagreed on their premise, that maya is indescribable, and went after each other with scissors.

Since all men and women are born of woman, woman originally gets the blame for such madness. The original mayas were gnas, the celestial wives of the gods. Abstractly speaking, gna is the feminine principle, a principle that is, according to the testimony of many men, far more deceptive than the male principle. Maya was first of all the cosmic mother and the world-goddess. Aristocratic mayas were the consorts of male gods. The ordinary maya is a temptress or feared woman. A woman who really knows her maya turn a warrior into a pussycat and have him eating out of her hand. In the Mahabhrata, the god uses his maya to delude mankind, to play with people as if they were toys. Of course women alone not to mention Venus are not really to blame for maya, the illusory, beguiling power, although their natural difference gives them cause to master it. Men of course have a hand in their own illusions and delusions - they are self-deluded to some extent. The erotic power makes two tangle. We are better off blaming our own ignorance than maya. Incidentally, according to some schools of thought, maya is a synonym for ignorance (ajnana and nescience (avidya).

Perhaps it is ignorance that leads men to believe that ignorance is caused by a certain and deliberate power, a divine power with two faculties: to project the world (viksepa), and cover or hide the truth (avarana). Some fakirs claim that this world is the one-god's sport or play because god has a whim to be many instead of one; those of us who are many are bewildered as a consequence of the projected divisions of the one; the truth is hidden by a cosmic veil; only a few fakirs can pierce that veil and be liberated from this illusory grinding up of the one - we can thank god that they might choose to stay behind and lead the rest of us out of our confusion. If only we really understood that the apparent multiplicity of our world is 'maya' - our ignorance and illusion - the unreality negating the one true reality - we could cast off nature-ignorance, the mass delusion of the space-time continuum, and reside in blissfull truth. How that bliss differs from death or nothingness is subject to further speculation.

With the advent of modern science, the term 'maya' is most often employed in reference to feats of magic and illusionism. That is not to say that the prehistoric superstition attributing changes to the magical power of deities insteach of natural forces has been extinguished in the popular mind. A secret mayic cult in Manhattan limits admission to applicants who can jump through a plate glass door without breaking the glass.

Sri Tundraputa claims they are wasting plate glass, for anyone possessed of the yogic powers can, for example, transform themselves into a subatomic particle, race though the earth and come out the other side with the greatest of ease. The plate glass is an illusion, he says, but it is a real illusion, and should not be bother with as such. He pointed out that although the oldest scripture in the world, the Rgveda, sings of the power of deities to change shape and create illusory effects, nowhere do the Vedas question the reality of the illusory forms, no matter how incomprehensible those forms seemed at the time.

"Maya is the real cause of the material world," insisted Tundraputa. "Maya is just another name for Siva's guided energy, Sakti, or the mula-prakriti evolving as the phonomenal universe. Existence is necessarily restrained by maya. Time restrains eternity, hence we have mortality. Space restrains omnipresence, thus we have individuality. Desire restrains perfection, consequently we have incessant activity and suffering. Learning limits omniscience, therefore our ignorance. Dependence limits omnipotence, fatality is the result. Our relation to the Lord is restrained by limitations obscuring the Lord. The Lord's creation is especially obscure for those Westerners whose knowledge is limited by subject-predicate linguistics and the logical subject-object or experiencer-experienced static dichotomy. Jumping through plate glass windows might get disillusioned kids into hospitals and mental wards, but they will soon be disillusioned with disillusionment or enslaved by insanity, an unwholesome liberation."

My Absurdism

Having concluded that life in Kansas City as reported is absurd, I suppose I might learn to live an absurd life in Downtown Kansas City pursuant to the absurd doctrines of Absurdism that I am creating as I write, notwithstanding the fact that creative cosmopolitan critics are unwelcome downtown, especially in the Compassion Zone around City Hall.

Yet here I go again, like Sisyphus with his Stone. I shall take advantage of a modern convenience, the escalator, at least as long as security will permit my continuous up and downs. I am taking a shortcut, really. Why bother with the in-betweens when one is just going to go up or down the escalator again? Now the expression you see on my face is not a grimace - it is a free smile, a smile for nothing - and the sound you hear is not a grunt - it is a free laugh, a laugh for nothing.

A businessman on the United Missouri Bank escalator gave me the most hateful look yesterday when I smiled at him and laughed as we passed. He was walking up the ascending side; I was standing still on my side, simply enjoying the descent. He must have thought that he looked absurd. He might just as well have smiled, hence I thought I would do a good deed: I turned around and ran up my descending side. But he did not smile. He reported me to security; I was asked to leave - my demand to shake the hand of Rufus Crosby Kemper, Jr., chairman of the bank's board of directors, was rejected out of hand.

No problem. I went over to the Town Pavilion escalators to continue my futile task, for the sheer absurdity of it. Who knows? some day some one might join me in my rebellion against the in-betweens, and in that solidarity we shall be friends. Again, what is wanted are certain tenets or doctrines of Absurdism that one might live by. As I traveled up and down the escalators, I jotted down the following thoughts:

Since the outcomes of our moral actions are often unpredictable and absurd, let those actions or means be ends in themselves. Wherefore we fly from love to love for Love's sake. We act as we choose, in the illogical, absurd present, or in the Now, or in Nothing if there is no Now.

Instead of worrying about nothing and belaboring the fact that no-thing is eternal, we might have faith in Nothing and choose to be Nothing, for Nothing is Perfect and Nothing is Impossible. Sisyphus labored willingly and laughed at the gods who sentenced him to futility. But we laugh at ourselves as we rebel against every definition of god or gods, knowing full well that our rebellion against the one-god or the many-gods is futile, that even a mocking victory is absurd. Yet we are given to struggle even though we are aware that our passion to exhaust the given and the imagined is ultimately useless - indeed, in our very inutility do we rebel and revel.

We put our whole effort into the absurd, ambiguous struggle. We seduce to love. We act to live. We make to create. We imagine to be. Above all, in the stones on our shoulders, we would be perfectly clear, or, as Camus put it, lucid. We would pierce the veils, including the veil of the money-god. Although creative cosmopolitans are not welcome in Metropolitan Kansas City, where editors have their heads buried in the military-industrial sand, we would know the cosmos without illusion, no matter how painful insight into the Absurd might be - indeed, it is mostly funny, and that is why we wallow in the Absurd. Who are we? I don't know. Me and my shadowy reflection of you if you please.

Speaking for myself, whom I do not know, I see that my absurd art of living at present is literary. Camus had his down to earth, everyday moral actions, his humane deeds to do, but what does an alienated writer without a cosmos to know do in Downtown Kansas City? Boost the power elite's real estate projects? no matter how absurd they may be? Become a reporter who does not know the difference between news and advertising? sniff around City Hall? jump onto the mayor's lap and write tail-wagging reports about her toilet? Maybe. Maybe live and let live.

I have become aware of the platitudes, of the fact that, whomever we might be, we live a few cliches over and over and over, and that even the devices we use to cloak or style the recurrent themes are themselves variations of a small set of themes. Art expresses in certain ways the monotonous repetition death-life-death or life-death-life, nothing-something-nothing or something-nothing-something, so on and so forth ad infinitum. Everyone wants an escape from the blind path, but there is no escape but into Nothing.

Give me liberty or death? Well, now, absolute liberty or omnipotence is death to us all as individuals. Methinks we mostly prevaricate: we want more to belong than to be free. We are alienated the moment we are born, hence we cry for our mamas and would return to the womb rather than be independent. But we cannot go home again until death doth part us from our unwilling independence. We exchange mother's milk for mother's words and weave one illusion after another to avoid the outcome we instinctively still want; some of us go much farther, and try to escape our fate in hot air balloons. But our destination is the same, the beginning is the end and vice versa. How absurd! Shall the truth shall set us free from the illusion that we are free? Well, now, the truth is that we are imprisoned and there is no escape - every means of escape is in turn another form of prison. "That is a fact," my friend Joseph says of his libertarian tenets, "so just accept it."

Well, then, why complain when one can live and laugh? Never mind the fools who do not know they are fools. Do not ridicule, criticize, condemn, or complain except under a pen name; otherwise, go along, smile at the absurdities but refrain from laughing out loud in public, especially when looking in someone's direction. Above all, remember to have faith in Nothing, for Nothing is Perfect.

Still the mind repudiates itself and tries to cloak Nothing with something. What must be done? What must I do? A doctrine of Absurdism is needed. Now that the Absurd has leaped out at me from the incongruous, ambiguous media in a moment of lucidity, it appears that my own futile task is to belay preaching like a fool for one side of some inherently ambiguous principle, for one side of a contradiction or the other, and to simply express the Absurd without critical, editorial commentary, even if that means that I have said Nothing, that I have slipped into the void, have become submerged in the Absurd. That is to say, just paint the Absurd, period.

I would then be just another bulging-belly member of the bourgeoisie but for the fact of my lucidity. I would then appear to everyone else on the bus to be just another apparently stupid man without a car, while knowing that I am in fact quite smart yet just another fool going nowhere.

Single Horse Race 476 B.C.E.

Pindar's Olympian 1
For Hieron of Syracuse,
Single Horse Race, 476 B. C.

Water is best, and gold, like a blazing fire in the night, stands out supreme of all lordly wealth. But if, my heart, you wish to sing of contests, look no further for any star warmer than the Sun, shining by day through the lonely sky, and let us not proclaim any contest greater than Olympia.

From there glorious song enfolds the wisdom of poets, so that they loudly sing the son of Cronus, when they arrive at the rich and blessed hearth of Hieron, who wields the scepter of law in Sicily of many flocks, reaping every excellence at its peak, and is glorified by the choicest music, which we men often play around his hospitable table.

Come, take the Dorian lyre down from its peg, if the splendor of Pisa and of Pherenicus placed your mind under the influence of sweetest thoughts, when that horse ran swiftly beside the Alpheus, not needing to be spurred on in the race, and brought victory to his master, the king of Syracuse who delights in horses.

His glory shines in the settlement of fine men founded by Lydian Pelops, with whom the mighty holder of the earth Poseidon fell in love, when Clotho took him out of the pure cauldron, furnished with a gleaming ivory shoulder.

Yes, there are many marvels, and yet I suppose the speech of mortals beyond the true account can be deceptive, stories adorned with embroidered lies; and Grace, who fashions all gentle things for men, confers esteem and often contrives to make believable the unbelievable. But the days to come are the wisest witnesses.

It is seemly for a man to speak well of the gods; for the blame is less that way. Son of Tantalus, I will speak of you, contrary to earlier stories. When your father invited the gods to a very well-ordered banquet at his own dear Sipylus, in return for the meals he had enjoyed, then it was that the god of the splendid trident seized you, his mind overcome with desire, and carried you away on his team of golden horses to the highest home of widely-honored Zeus, to which at a later time Ganymede came also, to perform the same service for Zeus.

But when you disappeared, and people did not bring you back to your mother, for all their searching, right away some envious neighbor whispered that they cut you limb from limb with a knife into the water's rolling boil over the fire, and among the tables at the last course they divided and ate your flesh.

For me it is impossible to call one of the blessed gods a glutton. I stand back from it. Often the lot of evil-speakers is profitlessness. If indeed the watchers of Olympus ever honored a mortal man, that man was Tantalus. But he was not able to digest his great prosperity, and for his greed he gained overpowering ruin, which the Father hung over him: a mighty stone. Always longing to cast it away from his head, he wanders far from the joy of festivity. He has this helpless life of never-ending labor, a fourth toil after three others, because he stole from the gods nectar and ambrosia, with which they had made him immortal, and gave them to his drinking companions.

If any man expects that what he does escapes the notice of a god, he is wrong. Because of that the immortals sent the son of Tantalus back again to the swift-doomed race of men. And when he blossomed with the stature of fair youth, and down darkened his cheek, he turned his thoughts to an available marriage, to win glorious Hippodameia from her father, the lord of Pisa. He drew near to the gray sea, alone in the darkness, and called aloud on the deep-roaring god, skilled with the trident; and the god appeared to him, close at hand.

Pelops said to the god, “If the loving gifts of Cyprian Aphrodite result in any gratitude, Poseidon, then restrain the bronze spear of Oenomaus, and speed me in the swiftest chariot to Elis, and bring me to victory. For he has killed thirteen suitors, and postpones the marriage of his daughter. Great danger does not take hold of a coward. Since all men are compelled to die, why should anyone sit stewing an inglorious old age in the darkness, with no share of any fine deeds? As for me, on this contest I will take my stand. May you grant a welcome achievement.”

So he spoke, and he did not touch on words that were unaccomplished. Honoring him, the god gave him a golden chariot, and horses with untiring wings. He overcame the might of Oenomaus, and took the girl as his bride. She bore six sons, leaders of the people eager for excellence. Now he has a share in splendid blood-sacrifices, resting beside the ford of the Alpheus, where he has his attendant tomb beside the altar that is thronged with many visitors. The fame of Pelops shines from afar in the races of the Olympic festivals, where there are contests for swiftness of foot, and the bold heights of toiling strength.

A victor throughout the rest of his life enjoys honeyed calm, so far as contests can bestow it. But at any given time the glory of the present day is the highest one that comes to every mortal man. I must crown that man with the horse-song in the Aeolian strain. I am convinced that there is no host in the world today who is both knowledgeable about fine things and more sovereign in power, whom we shall adorn with the glorious folds of song.

A god is set over your ambitions as a guardian, Hieron, and he devises with this as his concern. If he does not desert you soon, I hope that I will celebrate an even greater sweetness, sped by a swift chariot, finding a helpful path of song when I come to the sunny hill of Cronus. For me the Muse tends her mightiest shaft of courage. Some men are great in one thing, others in another; but the peak of the farthest limit is for kings. Do not look beyond that! May it be yours to walk on high throughout your life, and mine to associate with victors as long as I live, distinguished for my skill among Greeks everywhere.

Meaningful Meaninglessness

Absurdism is easily criticized because it is really not a philosophy. Perhaps Sisyphus the sophist trickster outwitted Albert Camus the sophisticated author. It appears that for the sake of argument the good author argues unwittingly against his absurd argument, finding therein faith in faithlessness, and meaning in meaninglessness. Thus, while denying that the Absurd can be transcended, he obscurely transcended it while revolting futilely against it. Authors may devote their entire lives to refuting the Absurd, or to dress it up instead in pleasing garb. But is not that precisely the point? To build a kite and fly it?

Sisyphus - a Play in Progress

APXH

SISYPHUS:

My name is Sisyphus.
If it were not for me,
Mortals would have nothing
To talk about at all.
I am responsible
For the apparent rise
Of the Sun -
They give me no credit
For its fall!

I am not deaf to the gossip
About me,
And my shameless stone.
An author said of late
That I lead
An entirely futile life,
A life of one absurd revolution
After another,
Instead of doing
What any man
In his right mind
Would surely do,
If only he knew
What was rolling
Down the mountain -
Free himself,
Forthwith and forever,
From Fate!

Not that he would
If he would.

WE:

To what do we
Owe your appearance?

SISYPHUS:

People barely know themselves -
I periodically enlighten them.

WE:

Why?

SISYPHUS:

Why?
Because people
Must be stoned -
They have rocks for heads.
And I am duty bound
By obedience to myself,
As president of myself,
To trick the inmates
Of this perverse,
Rolling round house,
Into shattering their stones,
To free themselves
From the concatenations
Of their foolhardiness.

Wherefore I am named Sisyphus,
Or Se-sophos,
Meaning, Very Wise,

WE:

Tell us Sisyphus,
Where did you get
Your shining stone?

SISYPHUS:

Dragonessa Medusa,
Supreme female wisdom,
Made my marvelous mirror.

WE:

We see the light,
But are not enlightened.
Pray tell, then,
What have you done
For us lately?

SISYPHUS:

I so loved the world
That I created the gods.

WE:

Blasphemy!
Vanity!
Impiety!
Perjury!
Absurdity!

Will Sisyphus,
Who surpasses
All mortals
In intelligence,
Who is shrewdest
In contrivances,
Like a god,
Never learn
From the gods,
That he is merely
A mortal man?

Blasphemy!
He uses god's power to destroy god.
Vanity!
He names god to flatter himself.
Impiety!
He exalts ungodly over godly.
Perjury!
He lies against his own law.
Absurdity!
What could be more absurd?

CRITIAS:

Will you stand by silently, Sisyphus,
Confronted here as you are
By these capital charges?

SISYPHUS:

I have already said quite enough
To sufficiently incriminate myself.

CRITIAS:

And I, Critias,
Am duty bound
To rid the community
Of deception,
Whether the community
Likes lucidity or not.

SISYPHUS:

Then you have
Multitudes to condemn.
So many heads must roll.
Streets must run red
With blood gushing forth
From necks gaping
On every corner.
Few are left standing
In the end,
When people thirst
For higher power.

WE:

Be gone, Critias!
We need no bloody tyrant
To slake our thirst
For aristocratic blood.
We are equal under our law,
By, for, and of the people.

CRITIAS:

What greater tyranny can there be
Than democracy over noble virtue?
A noble character is more credible
Than any law commonly considered,
For no mere talker may overcome it.
Many severed heads of big talkers
Are duly attached to our rostrum.

WE:

Aristocratic heads,
For the most part,
Hang from your rostrum!
We each are cattle
Humbled by our numbers.
Noble virtue shall not overcome
The dignity of our laws,
Or the grace of our god,
Nor shall big talkers!

Now this sophisticate, Sisyphus.
Claims to have so loved the world
That he created even the One God,
Thus he vainly puts his cause
Before the First Cause.
Would you plead his case?

CRITIAS:

If Sisyphus speaks truly,
That he created the gods,
He created tyrants over fools -
I prefer several to one -
And you should thank him
For exposing the truth
About your divine idiocy.

Gods,
States,
Laws,
All tyrants,
Yet you call me tyrant!

I fear not democracy,
For if gods, states, and laws
Are human creations,
They are no match
For the learned man.

WE:

A tyrant and a sophist!
What more could we ask for
In a big talker
Who claims nobility
Instead of divinity?

If only he were a demagogue,
We might call ourselves free!

CRITIAS:

Your political order is your true religion,
And your demagogue its talking idol.

SISYPHUS:

I created the gods
Then the one and only god -
And that was a restoration.

CRITIAS:

Thus you speak
To further incriminate yourself,
The self-created god,
To whom I put this question,
If you dare to answer:
Why were the gods created?

SISYPHUS:

There was a time when the life of all men
Was unordered, bestial, the slave of force:
There was no reward for the virtuous;
There was no punishment for the wicked.
So men devised laws of retribution,
That Justice might be their great dictator,
Having arrogance as its servile slave,
And if anyone sinned, he was punished.

Since the laws now forbade them to commit
Their usual crimes out in the open,
They began to commit them secretly.
A very wise and clever man appeared,
And for love of man he invented fear
Of the gods, that mortals might have on hand
Useful means of frightening the wicked
If in secret they did or thought of some
Evil deed. And therefore he introduced
The Divine, saying that there is a god
Flourishing with immortal life, hearing,
And seeing with his mind, and thinking of
Everything and caring about these things,
And having divine nature, who will hear
Everything said among mortals, and will
Be able to see well all that is done.
If one secretly plans something evil,
He will never escape the gods in this,
For they have surpassing intelligence.

Together with these words he introduced
The most pleasant of teachings heard by men,
Covering up the truth with false theory,
He said the gods dwelt in remote places,
Out of reach of the understanding of
Mere earthly mortals, where he could therefore
Use gods to frighten men out of their wits,
And convince them hard life has its rewards
And its punishments in a hereafter,
As dictated from those upper regions,
Where they saw lightning and heard dread thunder,
Beheld the star-faced body of heaven,
The beautiful embroidery of Time -
The skilled craftsman who brought forth the bright mass
Of Sun, and wet shower upon the Earth.

With many fears did he surround mankind,
Through which he established the deity
In a fitting place with his argument,
And thus he quenched lawlessness among men.
For the first time mortals were persuaded,
To believe in a high race of deities.

CRITIAS:

May I presume that this man
Is none other than you, Sisyphus,
Who have laid claim to creating the gods?

SISYPHUS:

You may so presume.

CRITIAS:

I cannot say that I blame you,
At least not for the tyranny,
But I question your devices,
For gods created by men are deceptions
Which can be destroyed by wise men.

SISYPHUS:

But I am the wisest of all men,
Surpassing all mortals in intelligence,
Shrewdest in contrivances,
Like a god, as it were.

CRITIAS:

It is best that a real tyrant rule directly,
By virtue of truth,
Than for people to be deceived
By false representation.

WE:

Death to Critias! Death to Critias! Death to Critias!

As for you Sisyphus,
Your sophistry rolls over our heads,
Day by day,
Just to sink into night,
Again and again.
Why raise our hopes so highly?
To cruelly let us down?
What have we done
To deserve this stoning
Unto death?
Have you no shame?

Death to Sisyphus! Death to Sisyphus! Death to Sisyphus!

SISYPHUS:

Your death sentence is most condign,
For without the light of Day,
You would have no Apollo
Attending your far-flung future.

WE:

But what of Night?
And all that Darkness implies?

SISYPHUS:

A living thing that needs the light
Must rest at night,
Lest its yearning
give it cause for burning.

WE:

But we are afraid of the dark.

SISYPHUS:

Wherefore I gave you gods
To mask Chaos with Cosmos,
That you might understand
One another and be secure
In your numbers, as One.
Have you forgotten so soon?

WE:

Threefold Goddess
Rose from Chaos,
Dressed in Earth,
Sea, and Night.

Black-winged Night,
Mother of Mystery,
Courted by Wind,
Laid a Silver Egg
In the Womb of Darkness,
Hence Love was hatched.
To move the Cosmos.

Now Darkness lives
Under Earth,
And Night resides
In the West.

When Day retires,
Night appears
In her chariot,
Drawn by steeds
Good and Evil,
With Starry Court in train.

She leads the Twins,
Death and Sleep -
Night saved Sleep from Death,
And Mighty Zeus,
In awe of Night,
Dared not intervene.

Ambivalent Night,
Frightening friend,
Hides guilt and innocence,
Conceals stolen valuables,
Covers lover's charms,
Fosters fear and hope,
Turns sticks into snakes,
Logs into monsters,
Monsters into gods.

Mother's introspection,
Provokes vigilance,
And prepares us for
The surprises of
The Enlightening Dawn.

SISYPHUS:

Hence my cue,
The Crowing Cock.
What of the Fateful Sisters
Dwelling well in the cave
Nearby the Moon?

WE:

Clotho who spins,
Lachesis who draws,
Atropos who cuts,
By the light
Of the Silvery Moon,
Tell us please,
Whose face among us all
Is the most beautiful?


processing....

The Ultimate Absurdity

If god is eternal, then his suicide would be the ultimate logical absurdity. If god can not destroy himself, then he is not omnipotent or all-powerful. If god committed suicide, he would not exist, hence he would not be eternal. Given the logical contradictions of god's supposed attributes, a reasonable man has good cause to opine that it is impossible for an eternal and omnipotent god to exist.

Yet many are those who would be at least hypothetically at one with an impossible god - they might write the logical absurdity off as another "one of God's mysteries." Consider this excerpt from a December 1876 article in Fyodor Dostoevsky The Diary of a Writer:

"I cannot be happy except in the Harmony with the great all.... I consider the comedy perpetrated by nature altogether stupid... Humiliating for me to deign to play it.... I condemn that nature which... brought me into being in order to suffer - I condemn it to be annihilated with me."

The disillusioned speaker obviously desires something besides the harmony, say, of a fifth on the major scale, say between the notes C and G. He rather wants to be atoned with or be at one with a universal One; he would be absorbed by an One of which the world he hates is not a part; for, if it were a part, the tragi-comic world would persist. Such an undifferentiated One would of course be a static infinite void, an eternal nothingness similar to absolute space. The nebulous qualities of absolute space are similar to the theological definitions of God: Absolute Space = God - a fact not lost on the early metaphysicians of modern physics.

Of course the reasoning of our death-wishing author is absurd. There is no identity lacking a relationship, whether or not it is a harmonious one. Further, the suicide leaves the very thing he protests behind - the world persists. The same may be said of the virtual suicide of the ascetic who protests against vanity, claiming that all things of this world pass, therefore it is vain to place confidence in them: the world however persists long after the protestant perishes, which leads us to ask whether or not his heaven, whatever the imagined contents of its absolute space may be, is actually the Vanity of vanities.

Methinks the impossible god represents the will to power, the will to persist forever, something which most of us would not mind doing provided that we did not suffer too much. If no such god exists, men are left to their own relative devices and powers: they are their own gods, petty gods or demi-gods, so to speak. Confronted with relative existence, with the apparent fact that everything perishes and that every living being dies, a few individuals will always manage to reason themselves to death. After thinking on the matter for awhile, they conclude that they might as well face the terrifying truth now, that life is absurd, and take advantage of the ultimate exercise of their relative power, the power to destroy themselves.

Instead of avoiding reality and wasting time with one futile diversion after another, instead of leading an absurd life in a godless universe with a world deaf to their need for eternal life, some folks are disposed to dispense with themselves forthwith; not necessarily because they despaired, but simply because, like President Clinton, they could if they would. Forsaking all else except their love for efficiency, self-destruction seemed to be the reasonable thing to do. Why waste valuable time? And, in his self-sacrifice of his self to his self, at least a man would courageously prove that he, judge and victim, has the power of life and death over himself, and is in fact the god so many people are in need of.

There are a number of men in our midst for whom life on earth is insufficient yet not insufferable providing they have sufficient leisure to gradually reason themselves to death. Logic-chopping suicide is self-murder by gradual mental amputation. Many logical suicidal fanatics never get around to actually killing themselves, preferring an extended virtual suicide to the real thing. Some of them are too preoccupied with philosophy as a preparation for death, or with writing novels about suicidal protagonists, to take their own lives that seriously.

Fyodor Dostoevsky said that his life was tormented by the question of God's existence. That question is obviously the thorn in the side of several of his characters, who are as salt in their creator's wound. And those of us who appreciate the works of Dostoevsky if not his personal suffering are glad of that. We are not afraid of his doubts. Even those who consider the question personally irrelevant have been amused by the characters for whom the subject is crucial.

Dostoevsky reasoned on the pressing issues of his day inThe Diary of a Writer- the Diary was initially a column in the Citizen but later an independent periodical. Of course the eternal and omnipotent god was dying in those days and the number of people who believe in the immortality of the son of man - meaning the ideal man abstracted from men - was on the wane.

"If faith in immortality is so necessary to the human being," speculated Dostoevsky in the Diary, "that without it he comes to the point of killing himself, it must be the normal state of humanity. Since this is the case, the immortality of the soul exists without any doubt."

Of course that argument was hardly the end of Dostoevsky epic internal combat. The speculation itself is specious. Evidence is ample that faith in immortality is not necessary for the human being to persist. Many people believe that life ends with the death of the body and that no soul survives et cetera; and many of them have even rejoiced at the supposed finality of each life; yet they did not go hang themselves, and many lead happy lives. We must also note here that suicide would be impossible if the soul really were immortal; in that case, all suicide attempts would be futile - Hamlet was troubled by that possibility.

As for me, my opinion on the existence of god is irrelevant to orthodoxy since I am not a licensed spiritual consultant; but that shall not stop me from giving it: I am moved to opine that human beings have a sort of "blind faith" in their persistence, a faith inherent in their will to live. The subsequent reasoning thereupon, the dogmas and doctrines, some of them quite beautiful, may be useful in rounding up the herd in a secure place, for misery loves company. After all, for the sake of social coherence it is convenient to construe certain dogma as if it were true.

Nonetheless, religious dogmas and doctrines, such as the doctrine that faith not works saves, appear to me to express more fear than faith. And those who persist in forcing their faith on others have more to fear than most; for instance, the old Jewish notion that it is just to hate missionaries, as if they were murderers, has merit inasmuch as to convert a Jew is to kill a Jew. I have heard it said that people must abide with a particular blind faith or the other. Universal skepticism towards all faiths, or the "godlessness" of those "demons" who refuse to participate in the conspiracies around the holy camp fires, is blamed for the ruination of the world. But the current evidence suggests that this world is not being brought to ruin by skeptics but rather by irrational fundamentalists who have fanatic faith in the Terrorist Almighty: Islamists, Zionists, the Christian Right and Company. They appear as regressives or "conservatives" who revert to the ancient, heroic way to immortality, in the mass suicide of war; for instance, the Greek heroes who sought immortality in killing enemies.

I have met a few truly faithful people; they had nothing whatsoever to prove to anyone at all; their fearless example in bearing witness through their works alone was proof enough to those who worked beside them.

Methinks morality whether it is distinctively religious or not is a sort of virtual suicide. People like myself used to drink religiously in ancient times, then gave it up. In my case, I developed an extra-dry sense of humor when I deserted the tavern-churches and took up writing interminable screeds in cheaper and cheaper garrets. I became a virtual ascetic, abandoning all but one or two of those activities some refer to as "sins." After all these years of doing without, I might be Leaving Las Vegas with one last blast - if I survive, at least I will have to make good money to keep up with my bad habits. Pending that return to the sweet life, I must reiterate that morality as I know it is a sort of suicide - one would hope for the sake of the species. It is said that a man who conquers himself - a congery of habits - is the most powerful man of all. An ascetic who conquers himself might reason, Why wait? Why not end it all now? Why not exercise the ultimate power and actually be a god?

One of my favorite virtual characters of the logical-suicide type is Dostoevsky Kirilov, the protagonist in The Possessed who fancied that Christ did not find himself in Paradise after his suicide-by-mankind, but had lived and died for a falsehood or illusion.

"It has always surprised me," said Kirilov, "that everybody goes on living.... If there's no God, then I'm God.... If God exists, then the whole will is His and I can do nothing. If he doesn't exist, then all will is mine and I must exercise my own will, my free will.... "

That is, If God does not exist, everything depends on us. To be truly independent, kill God and become God. If God is eternal, becoming God would realize eternal life - the Power that men worship - on Earth, at least for the time being. Why then commit suicide? Because, or so the perverse reasoning goes, the most glorious exercise of the newly found fearless freedom is to sacrifice it. Again, Why? Out of love for humanity, of course, the son of man, the ideal man, provides humankind with a lesson - his suicide is pedagogical. The ideal man will by the last god to die for all the rest, and thus immortalize humankind on Earth. He is the grandest paranoid man, the most humiliated and exalted man on Earth, and by virtue of his self-martyrdom, the hypocrisy or underlying crisis of humankind will be resolved along with the embarrassing ambiguities, and everyone may become an enlightened god on Earth, or a Christ-Tsar. Humankind is now divine, is free at last! Thus the divine suicide sacrifices himself not to eliminate his own unhappiness, but to free all his neighbors out of love for them, wherefore they do not have to take the same fatal step providing by virtual suicide they take the metaphysical leap to his fearless faith. Kirilov is not suffering from an illusion: in the final analysis, he is deluded; no matter how impeccable his logic might be - and it is not - he has broken with reality. Intolerant of ambiguity, of the absurdity of particular contradictions to the universal, he would in madness rid himself of the ambiguous by reasoning himself to death. Logic is for application to a particular objective purpose or practice, and not for the destruction of the logician. In fine, Kirilov is unwholesome, or, if you will, insane.

"I can't imagine," Kirilov continues, "that there's not one person on our planet who, having put an end to God and believing in his own free will, will dare to exercise that free will in the most important point. It would be like a pauper inheriting a bag full of money and not daring to put his hand into it, thinking himself too weak to own it.... I have an obligation to shoot myself because the supreme gesture of free will is to kill oneself.... I am the only one to do it without reason, just to establish my free will.... I must affirm my unbelief, for there's nothing higher for me than the thought that there's no God. The history of mankind is on my side. Man kept inventing God in order to live, so as not to have to kill himself. To this day, the history of mankind consists of just that. I am the first man in history to refuse to invent God. I want it to be known always.... Only one - the first one to realize it, that he's God, must kill himself.... I'm terribly unhappy because I'm terribly afraid. Fear is the curse of man. But I shall establish my free will. It is my duty to make myself believe that I do not believe in God. I'll be the first and the last, and that will open the door. And I'll save them.... For three years I've searched for the attribute of my divinity and I've found it - my free will! This is all I have at my disposal to show my independence and the terrifying new freedom I have gained. Because this freedom is terrifying all right, I'm killing myself to demonstrate my independence and my new terrifying freedom!"

The Brothers Karamazov was Dostoevsky titanic torment on the pressing question. No doubt it was homeopathic medicine for the impoverished author's pain. It concluded with the announcement of a future life.

Kolya (a boy), asks, "Karamazov, is it true what religion says, that we shall rise from the dead, that we shall see one another again?"

"Certainly we shall see one another again, we shall joyfully tell one another what happened."

The gospel of immortality and the dogma of an eternal god may be absurd but real; existence may be at once illusory and eternal; and a person can be both incredulous and convicted: "I doubt it, but I believe it despite myself.

The character typified by Kirilov, Stavrogin, Ivan, is defeated at the end of Dostoevsky gigantic literary combat with God and Vanity. We shall meet again. Suicide and madness are unnecessary, useless, for we shall enjoy immortality, be as the eternal god, gods ourselves, after death on this sphere.


Quoted: Dostoevsky, Fyodor, The Possessed, Trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew, New York: Signet 1962