Dear Reader,
Sometimes I use language to express something without understanding or truly inhabiting the implications of each
word summoned. “Absurd” is such a word. Absurd is something unbelievable: “Oh, your teacher assigned an essay
and a paper due on the same day? That’s absurd!” Absurd encapsulates shock, stun, utter disbelief; it is both hyperbolic
and elegant. The root of this analysis, however, is based on a merely colloquial knowledge of the word. Although I
doubt the merit of assigning words true “meaning,” I posit that wading through absurd’s philosophical context will
bear thoughts for reflection.
Enter Albert Camus and his Myth of Sisyphus. My tendency towards venerating canonical authors is barely an
intellectual asset, yet I couldn’t help but live in the pages of this book. Perhaps I was driven by an unconscious
desire to understand the central idea of Camus’ text (the one at the center of today’s discussion): the absurd.
Absurdity in Camus is not an empty, casual noun. It is a paradox, holding open the contradiction between our
appetite for absolute understanding/unity/truth and the impossibility of reducing our world to these rational
principles; I yearn to know, yet the knowledge I seek is unintelligible. To live an absurd life in the quagmire of this
paradox means banishing hope. We must conclude that nothing exists after death, thus we focus awareness on our
futile (yet strangely happy) condition.
I want to know what the absurd means to me, a young woman engulfed in life as a college student. I want to know
what the absurd means to you, whoever you are. But first, I must understand what Camus is really getting at in The
Myth of Sisyphus.
To begin this task, I will jump into the last fourth of the book: Camus’ explanation of absurd art. Art has always
had the power of illuminating themes or feelings that were previously unenumerable. I want to use this section to
make sense of something that seems central to the absurd, as imagined by Camus. If the heading “Ephemeral Creation”
wasn’t a clear hint, Camus suggests that absurd art encapsulates a kind of negativity. It is crucially fleeting, existing
in one moment only to disappear in the next. The absurd artist, as Camus states, works and creates “for nothing”
because they “know that one’s creation has no future” (114). This is not the classic art that sits for posterity in
dusty museums. I believe Camus wants us to consider works with definitive expiration dates as the bedrock for
absurd expression.
There’s no better example of absurd art than Scott Polach’s piece Applause Encouraged. On a cliffside in San Diego,
eight guests are ushered into a roped-off area—not dissimilar to box seats at a movie theater—to sit and watch the
sunset for forty-five minutes. Once the sun has disappeared, the guests stand and applaud. Polach’s work is
precisely about impermanence: the sun must inevitably set. By bringing attention to the sunset, however, Polach
asserts some kind of beauty in something fundamentally ephemeral (to use Camus’ word). There’s no hope that the
work will continue or that anything will last once night has set in. If sunset embodies a kind of “negativity,” Polach
achieves Camus’ task for the absurd artist by giving “the void its colors” (114). Actually producing very little by
way of material “art,” Polach illuminates something stirring in the presence (and then the absence) of the setting
sun.
Art promotes attention to the absurd in everyday life. By this standard, it does not take formal talent to put absurd
art into the world. Cut to this week’s assignment: in lieu of our author’s appeals for embodying absurd life, I (and
you, if you so choose) will find some piece of expression with a definitive end that brings forth lucidity of our
absurd condition.
With love,
Anna
