By The Landlord
“Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it's in my basement... let me go upstairs and check.” – M.C.Escher
“In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.” – Miguel de Cervantes
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” – Søren Kierkegaard
“How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.” – Søren Kierkegaard
“There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero
“The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.” – Albert Camus
“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.” - Albert Camus
“The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.” – Bertrand Russell
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” - Karl Marx
“Every morning I get up and make instant coffee and I drink it so I have the energy to make real coffee.” – Steven Wright
A baby Sardine
Saw her first submarine:
She was scared and watched through a peephole.
‘Oh, come, come, come,’
Said the Sardine’s mum,
‘It’s only a tin full of people.’ – Sardines, Spike Milligan
The man who crashed his car over a cliff and died, simply attempting not to be stung by a wasp. The 19th-century congressman who accidentally shot and killed himself while demonstrating how another man might have accidentally shot and killed himself. The lawyer who fell out of a 24-storey office building while trying to prove the glass window was unbreakable. The man who drowned in a swimming pool at a party for lifeguards, an event celebrating an incident-free season. The sea captain who died in a cannon salute he ordered to celebrate a recent victory. The anti-seatbelt campaigner who died in a car crash because … well, you can guess.
The president who falsely accused another president of ruining a chance of peace and risking world war three, by himself saying this and ruining a chance of peace and risking world war three. All of these are real-life events. Ironic, pointless, stupid and of course, absurd.
Life – and death – can be like that, and, in attempting to capture some clarity, or perhaps more accurately a sense of freedom, absurdism is the philosophical theory that the universe is irrational, uncontrollable and, ironically, meaningless. It sits between existentialism – which is all about an individual's perspective and experience, and nihilism - the dark perception of moral bankruptcy, pointlessness, nothingness.
But accepting meaninglessness, but still embracing life, absurdism then has a range of emotions, often with a dark or even light sense of comedy, a freewheeling, chaotic sense of experience and living in the present, and also, arguably, a logical response to scary, difficult times. So it seems appropriate, that this week, we explore and even celebrate the absurd through the prism of music and lyrics, in all of its various shades and colours, inspired by everything from the silly, farcical and amusing to dark and menacing. Such a range could include at one end, the poems of Spike Milligan or Edward Lear, or the books of Lewis Carroll to at the other the bleak, irrational, frightening scenario of Franz Kafka's The Trial, where Josef K is arrested and prosecuted for a crime neither he nor the reader ever learn about.
The absurd might trigger memories of some previous and parallel topics such as songs with non sequiturs, or songs about nothing, songs about the strange, disturbing and surreal, and for a very handy and entertaining display of some various philosphical definitions, songs about the meaning of life. Absurdism, however, finds its own ground in a different area - meaninglessness, and while there are overlaps, not every non sequitur, not everything surreal, not all nihilism, not obviously not everything in life's meaning, is indeed absurd.
Albert Camus
Influenced variously by Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Lev Shestov, Søren Kierkegaard, and Edmund Husserl, Albert Camus is a central figure in absurdism, and like many with a sense of the absurd, had a life coloured by war, tragedy, and massive upheaval and absurd contrasts. Brought up in French-colonised Algeria, this football-loving, handsome, working-class, communist-leaning, book-loving intellectual, dramatist and philosopher and sometime friend of Jean-Paul Sartre, lost his father in the First World War, suffered a bad dose of tuberculosis when only 17, also fought in the Resistance in WW2, and then tragically died in a car accident in 1960 at the age of 46. He could certainly be seen as a man who experienced everything life threw at him, even scooping the Nobel Prize For Literature in 1957.
The rolling stone … The Myth of Sisyphus
Central to his absurdism are arguably two works both published a the height of the war in 1942. The Myth of Sisyphus, is a philosophical essay about Greek myth of Zeus, who punishes King Sisyphus by compelling him to roll a massive boulder up a hill. Whenever the boulder reaches the top, it rolls down again, thereby forcing Sisyphus to repeat the same task all over again throughout eternity.
As Camus puts it: “The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.”
The other central work of that year is L’Etranger, a novel written in the first person, centred on the character of Meursault, who among other events, first experiences, with an odd detachment, the death of his mother (“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.”). He later stops his friend Raymond from killing an Arab on a beach in an jealous altercation over a lover, only to later do exactly that with a revolver, his perceived opponent’s knife flashing in the sunlight in the searing heat, all related in a very strange, surreal passage of writing. Ultimately Meursault is arrested, tried and executed for his crime. The book, highly influential, and which refocuses a human way of perceiving the world, includes key phrases such as: “I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world”, “Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter,” "I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God,” and “If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.”
Absurdism may embrace everything that’s meaningless, but also in the oddest sort of way, enjoys it, experiences it. The absurd can be strange, scary, dark, but also farcical, surreal and drolly amusing.
The philosophy of Camus, his prior influences, and various associated works have in turn been hugely influential on other writers, artists, film-makers an songwriters in form and content, music and lyrics. It’s perhaps no coincidence that many of the best absurdists experienced, either directly or indirectly, a major war.
Camus was also a dramatist, but it’s perhaps Eugene Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett who are best known as key figures in the theatre of the absurd. Beckett, like Camus was also a member of the French Resistance. But how do you respond to the horrors of war? One way may be to express it as meaningless with streams of surreal consciousness and self-reference. Waiting for meaning. Or answers, or redemption from God. Godot will probably never arrive:
Another great Frenchman who served in the war, and whose work responded to world events in his own, absurdist, yet lighter, more comic style is the film-maker Jacques Tati (1907-1982). His recurring character Monsieur Hulot encounters, with a bemused confusion modern technology in many forms, including various locations in houses or hyperconsumerist mid-century modern Paris, from airports, offices to parties, car showrooms to trams. It’s brilliantly choreographed visual humour. Here’s a clip from 1967’s Playtime:
David Lynch, creator of Twin Peaks and other masterpieces steeped in the absurd and surreal, was also hugely influenced by Tati. Here he speaks more about him with clips:
Lynch expanded on his own sense of the absurd with these later remarks. "My films are not comedies, but there's comedy in them from time to time, absurdities, just like in real life … Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there's humour in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd.”
Another American perspective, post-war, but actually set during it, is that great work by Joseph Heller, Catch-22, which he began writing in 1953. It centres around the absurdities experienced by antihero Captain John Yossarian, a US Army Air Force B-25 bombardier, who continual encounters the ridiculous, irrational, pointless behaviour of many fellow soldiers, and the many paradox of being unable to escape the situation.
Also in comedy, and more indirectly in shadow of war, Spike Milligan and his Goon pals all served in the British army so there was a dark background to their silliness. Influenced by them, The Monty Python gang were all born during the Second World War, and as children had full sense of its aftermath. There’s many examples of the absurdist humour, but the one that stands out for me is the Black Knight in The Holy Grail, who brings an absurdist stiff upper lip, and, despite losing limbs, refuses to give up the fight: “It’s only a flesh wound."
Absurdity isn’t ever going away. But how is it expressed in song? Over to you then, and the also to this week’s guest playlist picker, the excellent Loud Atlas. Please put your suggestions in comments below, for deadline at 11pm on Monday UK time. Is there any point? Perhaps, nothing more than for the sheer fun of it. It’s simply … Playtime.
Melody of Rain by absurdist painter Michael Cheval (2015)
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