# 45. Better Than a Poke in the Eye.
Life's Absurd. Be Merry!
Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.
― David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, 2006.
Dear Readers,
Bear with me, I came to philosophy late in life. I - like you perhaps? - am a product of mass schooling in the 80s and 90s where the aim was less enlightenment, empathy and self-actualisation and more literacy, numeracy and obedience.
I am still trying to catch up with ideas that matter, ideas that can huff and puff and blow the house down. I have many questions. Questions such as: How do we keep wrangling when we know we will lose everything in the end? Even our collagen!
Or: Why do I feel compelled to re-read L'Étranger? Could it be that The Meaning of Life is to find The Meaning of Life? I attempt to answer these and other questions by writing, and occasionally by publishing my writing, here on this abyss.
I hope you enjoy my erratic outbursts as much as I enjoy expelling them.
Yours truly,
~ TS.
Life is meaningless. Except for the meaning we give it. (Said Satre.) We give Life meaning because without it, why on earth would we push the eternal boulder up the hill?
Meaning (formerly “God”) was slayed by Science and now we don’t know what to do. We are lost. We are free. We are dancing in the dark. (Said Neitzche.)
In 2025, Life is at least as baffling as it was 100 years ago when Western Existentialists said we were doomed. Convicted felons can be leaders of the free world and leaders of industry - and be the same person!
Fake news online can cause a real apocalypse on the ground and old-growth forests can be razed to make shampoo. Shampoo can poison the blood in our veins and the aquifers on our planet, and shampoo makers can declare themselves King of All The Wild Things and eat us all up.
What does this all Mean?
I don’t think I - or anyone else - will ever find it but I do think the search for Meaning is an in-built feature in our species of ape. I think this because we come with a convenient app: the ability to acquire language.
Language: key to the treasure chest, catflap to the garden, trap door to the rabbit hole! I love English. I also love translations into English. So what if language is only an approximation of Meaning and translations are approximations of approximations? Love is blind and fools rush in!
I wonder: is this Stockholm Syndrome? As the offspring of generations of colonial subjects, do I want to possess the language, literature and philosophy of (racist? misogynist?) dead white men in a father-of-all Daddy issues kinda way? Well, anyhoo, here I am. And there is much grave digging to do!
No sentence in French literature in English translation is better known than the opening sentence of The Stranger. It has become a sacred cow of sorts, and I have changed it…
― Mathew Ward in the introduction to his translation of Albert Camus’s, L’Etranger, 1989.
Mathew Ward changed the word “Mother” to “Maman” in Camus’s L’Etranger. Did he feel emboldened to do so because Satre said Meaursaut’s feelings for his maman were not conveyed adequately by “Mother”?
Is “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe… ” infinitely superior to “Mother died today. Or yesterday maybe…”? Yes! No? While you decide, here’s another question: What’s wrong with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo? Why can’t I make myself read it?
I think it is because L'Étranger is shorter (155 pages vs 544 pages) and also, I believe it has Big Fish. A Confession: In college, I read Notes from the Underground which is 104 pages and not The Brothers Karamazov which is 875 pages, just to be able to say I read Dostoyevsky and not be lying.
Brevity is also why I love Vonnegut.
Teeny books, whopping megadalons within. However, once you’ve read L'Étranger or Slaughterhouse Five you see the world through the eyes of Camus and Vonnegut. Which for a writer, is bad news, because you want to write like them one day. It’s Waiting for Godot - ‘cause Godot ain’t comin’!
But maybe he will?
So we wait. Better than adding more shit to the pile, right?
Or write? Living gestates questions. Writing births the answers, And also:
A non-writing writer… is a monster courting insanity.
― Franz Kafka, in a letter to Max Brod, 1922
While we wait, reading is prep. Right? Write. So back to Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. It might be a good book, but I won’t read it. It seems Little Fishy to me. This is Stieg Larsson’s opening sentence:
“On the day he turned forty, Mikael Blomkvist left the Stockholm District Court, having been found guilty of libel and defamation of character against the powerful industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström”.
Not quite “Mother died today. Or yesterday maybe...”. So, nah. When I am in the mood for Little Fish, which I often am, I dangle a grub on the banks of streaming services. There I can find byte-sized wonders (Never Have I Ever!) floating belly-up on the backwash and am often surprised by how tasty they are!
Sometimes, there be barracuda (White Lotus). Those slippery fish are hard to catch and difficult to digest, but I will swallow them whole. I do it for the aftertaste of Camus and Vonnegut.
People who do not read are brutes.
― Eugene Ionesco, The Paris Review, 1984.
I do not think that all people who do not read are brutes! Some of the most interesting people I’ve ever met can’t read. Usually, because they are two-year-olds. Or dogs. Or two-year-old dogs. But seriously:
I have a sense that Illiterate people are closer to understanding The Meaning of Life than literate ones because they have not been discombobulated by a rubbish education. "There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy." (Said Neitzche, again.)
But I also think that if you are literate and a reader (not the same thing) you are probably not dancing in the dark. You are probably not completely lost. You are searching. You are “out with lanterns, looking for [your]self”.
Annoying, I know, but the first rule of Book Club is to talk about Book Club. Here we learn that there is just One Story. It has no Beginning, no Middle and no End. That’s just marketing. A con.
Here you find out that Character is where the Action is, but you can’t escape Plot. Because Plot sells. Plot sells because we want life to have Meaning. Which of course, it does not. When you embrace this reality, you come face-to-face with The Absurd.
If you want a happy ending, that depends of course, on where you stop the story.
― Orson Wells, The Big Brass Ring, 1999.
At The Absurd you are no longer in the House that Jack Built. At Jack’s house, there is no fire insurance, the Wolf is always at the door and Happiness is a Warm Gun. Jack is a jackass.
At The Absurd, there is no roof and no wolf. Here, Happiness is a warm puppy. The puppy will self-actualise and eat you up in the end, but until then you can live wild and free. You won’t have to run with the pack.
Become so very free that your whole existence is an act of rebellion.
― Albert Camus, The Rebellion, 1951.
In conclusion (and this is dramatic irony - because Plot sells!): Finding Meaning is a DIY thing. Stick with me here!: Because there is no Jack, no house to blow down, no wolf at the door that also must mean that I am not a little piggie - not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin!
I can resist limbic capitalism. I can resist its endless supply of doughnuts. I do not have to miss the point entirely. The point - I think - is just to be alive. Which is what Ancient Eastern Philosophers have been saying all along and what Alan Watts (bless them dead white men) brought back into the light.
The Yellow Brick Road led me right back home to Oz! And so it goes…
The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
- Alan Wilson Watts, The Culture of Counter-Culture, mid-60s.
Deep philosophy needs engagingly clear communication. And you Tara are a writer philosopher of high order.
Just so good !!