CAMUS FOR FRACTURED TIMES, AUTUMN 2016

Dear Albert

 

If, as you say,

We are anointed by the Absurd

When

The world cracks,

The “chain of daily gestures” breaks,

And the “cruel mathematics” of the world click home cold and true–

That moment when

We cannot but see

The collision between

Our yearning for the absolute and reason’s limitations,

That clash between

“the heart’s wild longing for clarity” and

“the unreasonable silence of the world”

 

Then,

Between

Bankers who steal their clients’ trust

Companies that decapitate mountains

Politicians who flout all reason and threaten to jail the opposition

Fishermen that, for fish bladders, drown porpoises

Shooters of the brown, the strange, and hooded children

and

The dark slaughterers of Aleppo

We are there,

Inducted into your hope-free league

 

And

If, as you propose,

In the face of this chaos,

This impossibility of adding up the world,

The only integrity is

To live solely on our eyes’ stark evidence,

To accept “without appeal,” the “difficult wisdom,”

To plant our stakes

At the “dizzying crest of nostalgia for unity and a fractured universe,”

And cradle in our arms forever these squirming twins,

Never putting one down to feed the other

 

Then

Grateful for your Myth, perhaps we may seize,

As a kind of un-solacing guide,

Your offered “style of life”–

What you call “the heart-rending, magnificent wager of the Absurd”:

 

Embrace lucidity as the sole surety,

and, masking nothing, refusing consolation,

attempt to shine intelligence’s light on all we cross

 

Accept “a universe in which nothing is possible”

but live always “as if”

we human beings may be re-formed

 

Exist on what we have

and, with a return to “daily acts,”

offer the world our “passionate attention”

and “live everything”—

feast on the vast bounty and diversity that are given

 

Discard hope

but greet the species’ condition in a spirit of defiance,

find liberation in futility,

and hold forever in treasured, taut tension your elegant trio:

Freedom, Passion, Revolt

 

And,

rich for our face-to-face struggle,

in “lucid despair,”

as condemned ones transfixed by “the pure flame of life”

without expectation of fruit,

eschewing reprieve,

and in pursuit of a truer happiness:

live for friendship “strong and chaste,”

and for the resilient, ancient joys–

mind, virtue, beauty, creation,

trailing after, as you suggest,

“something that transfigures, something delicate, mad or divine”

 

Following your tracks into Oran,

perhaps we may learn to desire

“nothing on which to hang

a mythology, a literature, an ethic, or a religion,

but stones, flesh, stars, and those truths the hand can touch”

 

Pitching our tents,

rich as any God,

in a vast barren among the rocks,

we may gaze up to “a sky dripping with stars”

and listen for “the myriad wondering little voices of the earth”