A Magnificent Rebel Still

It's been a week now since I have had some problems uploading photos from my computer. The problem is still there although I've been told it's been "fixed". So if there are no more photos, it's not for lack of trying. Fortunately, in the past week, I've been busy preparing for a talk on Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), an enigmatic loner whose thoughts have been creating some pretty big reverberations in the intellectual world of Europe for several decades by now.He's the type who is never content to sit quietly on the floor of an academic hall listening bemurely to disquisitions upon the philosophic giants of the past. He is always on the lookout for something new on whatever topics which happen to take his fancy at the moment whether it be linguistics, psychology, mathematics, biology, geology, cosmology, painting, poetry, novels, drama, cinema or philosophy. In his life, not too long but not too short either, he has produced either alone or with others more than 30 books! He is a model of intellectual productivity. But above all, he is a rebel. In that regard, he reminds me of another French thinker and artist I admire, Albert Camus (1913-1960), whose work I first read more than 30 years ago. Camus is famous for his novels, L'Etranger variously translated as The Stranger or the Outsider (1942) but he also wrote 4 others:La Peste (The Plague) (1947), La Chute (The Fall) (1956), La Mort Heureuse (A Happy Death) (1971) published posthumously and also a number of plays Caligula (1938), Requiem pour une nonne (Requiem for a Nun) (1956), Le Malentendu (The Miunderstanding (1944), L'Etat de Siege (The State of Siege) (1948), Les Justes (The Just) (1949) and Les Possédés (The Possessed) (1959). He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. I haven't read all his works, just a few. But I like all that I have read. This morning, as so often, my eyes wandered around my book shelf. They fell upon a book which I haven't touched for ages. It was The Myth of Sisyphus and other Essays by Camus. I opened it. I could not put it down. My eyes were glued after I read a few sentences. My eyes first chanced upon a part of the essay entitled "An Absurd Reasoning" . I had to finish it. I was hooked. One part led to another and one book to another...The following are some of the things I found.

He says that there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. All the rest--whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories--comes afterwards. I don't want to discuss here whether he is right or wrong. I only want to affirm here something which I hold dearly, the way he seizes upon life and what it has to offer: the imperious joys of the senses and the splendour of human emotions, indeterminate vague and simultaneously definite, remote and present, as Camus says, "as furnished us by beauty or aroused by absurdity". To him, deep feelings, like great works, always mean more than they are conscious of saying but "The mind's first step is to distinguish what is true from what is false. However, as soon as thought reflects on itself, what it first discovers is a contradiction": the absurdity of life itself. The heart within which we can feel, the world which we can touch. These are the only things we can know and there ends all our knowledge because to him, all the rest are "constructions". He gives an example. "if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.Socrates' "Know thyself" has as much value as the "Be virtuous" of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia at the same time as an ignorance. They are sterile exercises on great subjects. They are legitimate only in precisely so far as they are approximate."

To him, only the world of the senses feel "real". "Here are the trees and I know their knarled surface, water, and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night certain evenings when the heart relaxes--how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine....that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of the evening teach me much more....A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is the condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations." To him Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Karl Jaspers, Husserl, Heidegger,, Chestov vie with one another in proclaiming that nothing is clear and that "All is chaos, that all man has is his lucidity and his definite knowledge of the walls surrounding him."  and man stands face to face with the irrational: he "feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason, The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world....The absurd is not in man...nor in the world, but in their confrontation.".

Confronted with death and certain that there is no future, the absurd man can derive a lesson from the mystics. Mystics according to Camus, find freedom by giving themselves away: " By losing themselves in their god, by accepting his rules, they become secretly free. In spontaneously accepted slavery, they recover a deeper independence...they feel free with regard to themselves and not so much free as liberated." In the same way, "completely turned toward death,...the absurd man feels released from everything outside that passionate attention crystallizing in him. He enjoys a freedom with regard to common rules. ...In the same way...the slaves of antiquity did not belong to themselves. But they knew that freedom which consists in not feeling responsible. Death too, has patrician hands which, while crushing, also liberate." He calls this the "divine availability of the condemned man before whom the prison doors open in a certain early dawn, that unbelievable disinterestedness with regard to everything except for the pure flame of life." This too is a kind of freedom. Indeed, this is the only feasible kind of freedom which is available to the absurd man. He says, "it is clear that death and the absurd are here the principles of the only reasonable freedom: that which a human heart can experience and live...The absurd man thus catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness." He can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength:," his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation." He asks: "But what does life mean in such a universe?" He answers: "Nothing else for the moment but indifference to the future and a desire to use up everything that is given. He offers a suggested solution: "It is up to us to be conscious" of the absurdity of the human condition: "Being aware of one's life, one's revolt, one's freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum." He draws from the absurd three consequences: revolt, freedom and passion, by the mere activity of consciousness. He concludes with a reference to something which Nietzsche says may make it worth the trouble of continuing to live: "virtue, art, music, the dance, reason, the mind--something that transfigures, something delicate, mad, or divine." It may not not always be easy: "Obeying the flame is both the easiest and the hardest thing to do". But he says that it is good for man to judge himself occasionally. He has no other choice: "He is alone in being able to do so." He is not dogmatic. He says that all he is doing is to define a way of thinking, But "the point is to live".! 

And of course, even though it's the second time I read his "myth of Sisyphus", I could not fail to be touched by the nobility of his tragic hero, endlessly toiling to push up a rock to the summit of the hill only to see it tumbling down again so that he will have to repeat it all over again and again for all eternity as part of his punishment by the gods. As he says, there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. He is the absurd hero, "as much through his passions, as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth."  In the myth, "one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one see the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain."

Camus says that it is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests him. He says, "A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour of breathing space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock." To Camus, "Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent." But according to the author, "The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory" because "there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn". He thinks that "if the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy...When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness become too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in man's heart: this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged". But Camus doesn't want to exaggerate.Although he says that "Happiness and the absurd are the two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.", he adds that it would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. In the same way, Oedipus says at the end of his travails, "Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well" To Camus, that remark is "sacred" as it "echoes in the wild and limited universe of man" because it teaches that "all is not, has not been exhausted. it drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile sufferings. It makes fate a human matter, which must be settled among men."  Sisyphus may have a silent joy in his heart because "his fate belongs to him". It may not have started with his consent but he has adopted it as his very own.His rock has become his thing, the instrument of torture has become his weapon against the fate cast upon him by the gods. When he contemplates his fate and makes it his own, he silences all the gods.

Of course, Sisyphus knows that there is no sun without shadow and that it is essential to know the night. But he also knows that he is the master of his days.Camus says (and this is the part I like most:) " At that subtle moment, when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see, who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling. I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. The universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that nigh-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy". What tragedy, what spirit! And I think Camus lives the way he thinks, if we may judge by the way he writes. An example? The Nuptials at Tipasa!

"IN THE
spring, Tipasa is inhabited by gods and the gods speak in the sun and the scent
of absinthe leaves, in the silver armor of the sea, in the raw blue sky, the
flower- covered ruins, and the great bubbles of light among the heaps of stone.
At certain hours of the day the countryside is black with sunlight. The eyes
try in vain to perceive anything but drops of light and colors trembling on the
lashes. The thick scent of aromatic plants tears at the throat and suffocates
in the vast heat. Far away, I can just make out the black bulk of the Chenoua,
rooted in the hills around the village, moving with a slow and heavy rhythm
until finally it crouches in the sea. 

The village we pass through to get there already opens on the bay. We enter a
blue and yellow world and Tipasa is a village on the Mediterranean coast, about fifty miles
from Algiers. We are welcomed by the pungent, odorous sigh of the Algerian summer earth.
Everywhere, pinkish bougainvillae hangs over villa walls; in the gardens the
hibiscus are still pale red, and there is a profusion of tea roses thick as
cream, with delicate borders of long, blue iris. All the stones are warm. As
we step off the buttercup yellow bus, butchers in their little red trucks are
making their morning rounds, calling to the villagers with their horns. 

To the left of the port, a dry stone stairway leads to the ruins, through the
mastic trees and broom. The path goes by a small lighthouse before plunging
into the open country. Already, at the foot of this lighthouse, large red,
yellow, and violet plants descend toward the first rocks, sucked at by the sea
with a kissing sound. As we stand in the slight breeze, with the sun warming
one side of our faces, we watch the light coming down from the sky, the smooth
sea and the smile of its glittering teeth. We are spectators for the last time
before we enter the kingdom of ruins. 

After a few steps, the smell of absinthe seizes one by the throat. The
wormwood's gray wool covers the ruins as far as the eye can see. Its oil
ferments in the heat, and the whole earth gives off a heady alcohol that makes
the sky flicker. We walk toward an encounter with love and desire. We are not
seeking lessons or the bitter philosophy one requires of greatness. Everything
seems futile here except the sun, our kisses, and the wild scents of the earth.
I do not seek solitude. I have often been here with those I loved and read on
their features the clear smile the face of love assumes. Here, I leave order
and moderation to others. The great free love of nature and the sea absorbs me
completely. In this marriage of ruins and springtime, the ruins have become
stones again, and losing the polish imposed on them by men, they have reverted
to nature. To celebrate the return of her prodigal daughters Nature has laid
out a profusion of flowers. The heliotrope pushes its red and white head
between the flagstones of the forum, red geraniums spill their blood over what
were houses, temples, and public squares. Like the men whom much knowledge
brings back to God, many years have brought these ruins back to their mother'1i
house. Today, their past has finally left them, and nothing distracts them from
the deep force pulling them back to the center of all that falls. 

How many hours have I spent crushing absinthe leaves, caressing ruins, trying
to match my breathing with the world's tumultuous sighs 1 Deep among wild
socents and concerts of somnolent insects, I open my eyes and heart to the
unbearable grandeur of this heat-soaked lily. It is not so easy to become what
one is, to rediscover one's deepest measure. But watching the solid backbone of
the Chenoua, my heart would grow calm with a strange certainty. I was learning
to breathe, I was fitting into things and fulfilling myself. As I climbed one
after another of the hills, each brought a reward, like the temple whose
columns measure the course of the sun and from which one can see the whole
village, its white and pink walls and green verandas. Like the basilica on the
East hill too, which still has its walls and is surrounded by a great circle of
uncovered ornamented coffins, most of them scarcely out of the earth, whose
nature they still'share. They used to contain corpses; now sage and wallflowers
grow in them. The Sainte-Salsa basilica is Christian, but each time we look out
through a gap in the walls we are greeted by the song of the world: hillsides
planted with pine and cypress trees, or the sea rolling its white horses twenty
yards away. The hill on which Sainte-Salsa is built has a flat top and the wind
blows more strongly through the portals. Under the morning sun, a great
happiness hovers in space. Those who need myths are indeed poor. Here the gods
serve as beds or resting places as the day races across the sky. I describe and
say: "This is red, this blue, this green. This is the sea, the mountain,
the flowers." Need I mention Dionysus to say that I love to crush mastic
bulbs under my nose? Is the old hymn that will later come to me quite
spontaneously even addressed to Demeter: "Happy is he alive who has seen
these things on earth"? How can we forget the lesson of sight and seeing
on this earth? All men had to do at the mysteries of Eleusis was watch. Yet
even here, I know that I shall never come close enough to the world. I must be
naked and dive into the sea, still scented with the perfumes of the earth, wash
them off in the sea, and consummate with my flesh the embrace for which sun and
sea, lips to lips, have so long been sighing. I feel the shock of the water, rise
up through a thick, cold glue, then dive back with my ears ringing, my nose
streaming, and the taste of salt in my mouth. As I swim, my arms shining with
water flash into gold in the sunlight, until I fold them in again with a twist
of all my muscles; the water streams along my body as my legs take tumultuous
possession of the waves-and the horizon disappears. On the beach, I flop down
on the sand, yield to the world, feel the weight of flesh and bones, again
dazed with sunlight, occasionally glancing at my arms where the water slides
off and patches of salt and soft blond hair appear on my skin. 

Here I understand what is meant by glory: the right to love without limits.
There is only one love in this world. To clasp a woman's body is also to hold
in one's arms this strange joy that descends from sky to sea. In a moment, when
I throw myself down among the absinthe plants to bring their scent into my
body, I shall know,  appearances to the contrary, that I am fulfilling a
truth which is the sun's and which will also be my death's. In a sense, it
is indeed my life that I am staking here, a life that tastes of warm stone,
that is full of the sighs of the sea and the rising song of the crickets. The
breeze is cool and the sky blue. I love this life with abandon and wish to
speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition. Yet people have
often told me: there's nothiingto be proud of. Yes, there is: this sun, this
sea, my heart leaping with youth, the salt taste of my body and this vast
landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow. It is to
conquer this that I need my strength and my resources. Everything here leaves
me intact, I surrender nothing of myself, and don no mask: learning patiently
and arduously how to live is enough for me. well worth all their arts of
living. 

Shortly before noon, we would come back through the ruins to a little cafe by
the side of the port. How cool was the welcome of a tall glass of iced green
mint in the shady room, to heads ringing with colors and the cymbals of the
sun.l Outside were the sea and the road burning with dust. Seated at the table,
I would try to blink my eyelids so as to catch the multicolored dazzle of the
white-hot sky. Our faces damp with sweat, but our bodies cool in light
clothing, we would flaunt the happy weariness of a day of nuptials with the
world. 

The food is bad in this cafe, but there is plenty of fruit, especially peaches,
whose juice drips down your chin as you bite into them. Gazing avidly before
me, my teeth closing on a peach, I can hear the blood pounding in my ears. The
vast silence of noon hangs over the sea. Every beautiful thing has a natural
pride in its own beauty, and today the world is allowing its pride to seep from every pore. Why, in
its presence, should I deny the joy of living, as long as I know everything is
not included in this joy? There is no shame in being happy. But today-the fool
is king, and I call those who fear pleasure fools. They've told us so much
about pride: you know, Lucifer's sin. Beware, they used to cry, you will lose
your soul, and your vital powers. I have in fact learned since that a certain
pride . But at other times I cannot prevent myself from asserting the pride
in living that the whole world conspires to give me. At Tipasa, "I
see" equals "I believe," and I am not stubborn enough to deny
what my hands can touch and my lips caress. I don't feel the need to make it
into a work of art, but to describe it, which is different. Tipasa seems to me
like a character one describes in order to give indirect expression to a
certain view of the world. Like such characters, Tipasa testifies to something,
and does it like a man. Tipasa is the personage I'm describing today, and it
seems to me that the very act of caressing and describing my delight will
insure that it has no end. There is a time for living and a time for giving
expression to life. There is also a time for creating, which is less natural.
For me it is enough to live with my whole body and bear witness with my whole heart.
LiveTipasa, manifest its lessons, and the work of art will come later. Herein
lies a freedom. 

I never spent more than a day at Tipasa. A moment always comes when one has
looked too long at a landscape, just as it is a long time before one sees enough
of it. Mountains, the sky, the sea are like faces whose barrenness or splendor
we discover by looking rather than seeing. But in order to be eloquent every
face must be seen anew. One complains of growing tired too quickly, when one
ought to be surprised that the world seems new only because we have forgotten
it.

Toward evening I would return to a more formal section of the park, set out as
a garden, just off the main road. Leaving the tumult of scents and sunlight, in
the cool evening air, the mind would grow calm and the body relaxed, savoring
the inner silence born of satisfied love. I would sit on a bench, watching the
countryside expand with light. I was full. Above me drooped a pomegranate tree,
its flower buds closed and ribbed like small tight fists containing every hope
of spring. There was rosemary behind me, and I could smell only the scent of
its alcohol. The hills were framed with trees, and beyond them stretched a band
of sea on which the sky, like a sail becalmed, rested in all its tenderness. I
felt a strange joy in my heart, the special joy that stems from a clear
conscience. There is a feeling actors have when they know they've played their
part well, that is to say, when they have made their own gestures coincide with
those of the ideal character they embody, having entered somehow into a
prearranged design, bringing it to life with their own heartbeats. That was
exactly what I felt: I had played my part well. I had performed my task as a
man, and the fact that I had known joy for one entire day seemed to me not an
exceptional success but the intense fulfillment of a condition which, in
certain circumstances, makes it our duty to be happy. Then we are alone again,
but satisfied. 

Now the trees were filled with birds. The earth would give a long sigh before
sliding into darkness. In a moment, with the first star, night would fall on
the theater of the world. The dazzling gods of day would return to their daily death. But other gods would come. And, though they would be darker,
their ravaged faces too would come from deep within the earth. For the moment at least, the waves' endless crashing against the shore
came toward me through a space dancing with golden pollen. Sea, landscape,
silence, scents of this earth, I would drink my fill of a scent-laden life,
sinking my teeth into the world's fruit, golden already, overwhelmed by the
feeling of its strong, sweet juice flowing on my lips. No, it was neither I nor
the world that counted, but solely the harmony and silence that gave birth to
the love between us. A love I was not foolish enough to claim for myself alone,
proudly aware that I shared it with a whole race born in the sun and sea,
alive and spirited, drawing greatness from its simplicity, and upright on the
beaches, smiling in complicity at the brilliance of its skies."

The sight, the sound, the touch of the sea, the blue sky, the lights of the sun or of descending darkness, the absinthe leaves, the pomegranate trees, the irises, the sun-soaked lily, the geraniums, crickets, the cool breeze, the taste of iced mint tea, the relaxed atmosphere and the clasp of a woman's body .... all attest to Camus sensibility to all that Nature has to offer to man upon his short span of time here. And he lived to the hilt, not only with sensibility but with passion and honesty, having been underground French Resistance fighter, communist, anti-communist, pacifist, writer, director, dramatist, editor and journalist, husband, father and lover. He remains true to himself .