when meaninglessness matters

I was skimming my old blog posts and ended up re-reading this old article about Tolstoy going through a sort of midlife crisis. Given the way our friend Nath died, this quote in particular felt poignant:

The third escape is that of strength and energy. It consists in destroying life, when one has understood that it is an evil and an absurdity. A few exceptionally strong and consistent people act so. Having understood the stupidity of the joke that has been played on them, and having understood that it is better to be dead than to be alive, and that it is best of all not to exist, they act accordingly and promptly end this stupid joke, since there are means: a rope round one’s neck, water, a knife to stick into one’s heart, or the trains on the railways; and the number of those of our circle who act in this way becomes greater and greater, and for the most part they act so at the best time of their life, when the strength of their mind is in full bloom and few habits degrading to the mind have as yet been acquired…

Reading through the whole thing I thought Thomas Nagel’s The Absurd is probably a good response to it or at least a place from which to see the types of mistakes he’s making. Tolstoy was in a really bad mood. A long mood for sure but a mood and that was his fundamental problem which led to all this rationalistic churn he couldn't seem to find his way out of rationally.

And that oddly enough brought me back to this Camus quote from the Myth of Sysiphus which hits on the problem nicely:

Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate. There is a universe of jealousy, of ambition, of selfishness, or of generosity. A universe—in other words, a metaphysic and an attitude of mind.

The thing is, when you’re feeling good, it doesn’t matter if life is meaningless. And if you’re feeling bad, it doesn’t matter if life is meaningful. What matters is how you feel and you'll take that feeling into your rationalizing (as our Scottish friend likes to say, "reason is the slave of the passions").

And I've rarely had rationalizing get me out of a mood. To get out of my long mood I needed art (flow) and I needed a lot of it. I needed a change of practice.

(If only there was a balm, we could call it mood-be-gone. This is why my psychotherapist aunt is always trying to get people to take drugs.)

the things you aspire to are no longer available

That to me is the crux of the midlife crisis.  Not all of us go through it but I'm in that age range and I can speak to it a bit.

For a while there I was just done.  It wasn't that I was depressed but I was sad and increasingly unwilling to put up with much nonsense at all.  And as you well know, this life throws a lot of shit at us so an unwillingness to put up with nonsense can be incapacitating.

My cousin Chris died and his death wiped the horizon.  The possibilities for the future changed.  Things I thought would eventually happen with him and his family were no longer going to happen.  I'm not the kind of guy who tries to have a lot of expectations and I don't believe in doing much planning for that reason (though I do a lot of contingency planning).  However, even someone like me has unwitting expectations in place that apparently can be shattered at a moment's notice.

Chris's death wasn't the only disappointment I experienced.  Professionally I was successful but increasingly irritated by the work and rolling that same rock up that same hill again and again.  When you're a cog in a company machine the value of your work is contingent upon other people's values and ability to deliver.

To say I'm disappointed in others is an understatement.  They've given up the game.  At this point it also seems evident the game was rigged from the beginning, we won't as a group overcome some really significant problems.  The snowball that brought us here has been rolling a long time and it's really picking up steam.  This problem requires significant re-framing.

When it comes to health, you start to see it at 40, sometimes earlier, sometimes a bit later but you'll start to see the signs of your inevitable demise.  And weird shit like hairs that grow who knows where and why (Ear lobe hair, what the fuck is that for?).  You get to the point that you must exercise (your exercise routine will likely be unique to your body) in order to just keep basic functionality going and you know it will get worse.

Long ago I aspired to create something inspired that would speak across generations.  I wanted to create a great work.  Now that just seems futile, the future isn't what it used to be.  

So I found myself in that space and started to put my energy into artistic expression because it's an easy spot for me to find intrinsic value.  I poured and poured myself into that and all the sudden I'm ready to be a good cog again.  

Phew.

pictures by Tolkien

Sarah sent me this link to pictures by Tolkien. I've been reading LoTR recently just because it's so therapeutic reading books like that again and again. I don't think I'll finish it this time but it's still been a nice break.

Nietzsche on inspiration

Belief in inspiration. - Artists have an interest in the existence of a belief in the sudden occurrence of ideas, in so-called inspirations; as though the idea of a work of art, a poem, the basic proposition of a philosophy flashed down from heaven like a ray of divine grace. In reality, the imagination of a good artist or thinker is productive continually, of old, mediocre and bad things, but his power of judgment, sharpened and practiced to the highest degree, rejects, selects, knots together; as we can now see from Beethoven’s notebooks how the most glorious melodies were put together gradually and as it were culled out of many beginnings. He who selects less rigorously and likes to give himself up to his imitative memory can, under the right circumstances, become a great improviser; but artistic improvisation is something very inferior in relation to the serious and carefully fashioned artistic idea. All the great artists have been great workers, inexhaustible not only in invention but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.

Inspiration again. - If productive power has been blocked for a time and prevented from flowing out by an obstruction, there occurs in the end an effusion so sudden it appears that an immediate inspiration without any preliminary labour, that is to say a miracle, has taken place. This constitutes the familiar deception with whose continuance the interest of all artists is, as aforesaid, a little too much involved. The capital has only been accumulated, it did not fall from the sky all at once. Similar apparent inspiration is also to be found in other domains, for example in that of goodness, virtue, vice.

HAH, I, 155-156

Reminds me of this article in the New Yorker from last month. Austin Kleon's take on "The Neuroscience of Not Knowing".

I used to call these sorts of insights "boom" experiences, at least the experiences of clarity that were particularly astonishing. As time went on though it became more obviously a function of how my mind works. I guess I don't have any reason to consider it less astonishing simply because it became more familiar.

Vonnegut's "essence of human wonder"

"The whole magical thing about our painting, Mrs. Berman, and this was old stuff in music, but it was brand new in painting: it was pure essence of human wonder, and wholly apart from food, from sex, from clothes, from houses, from drugs, from cars, from news, from money, from crime, from punishment, from games, from war, from peace--and surely apart from the universal human impulse among painters and plumbers alike toward inexplicable despair and self-destruction!"

Rabo Karabekian (Abstract Expressionist Painter)*
from Vonnegut's Bluebeard

"meaning of life" video game

You play as Tim, a tiny character scuttling his way across the screen through a series of mind-bending puzzles. You have to figure out when to move forward and backward in time.

As you play more, you realize that Tim has a lonely past — and is alienated from his lady love. And that all the moving backward and forward in time is a metaphor for Tim's attempts to figure out what went wrong in his relationship and where exactly he fits into the universe. When you rewind time, the screen turns red and the music plays backwards — it's disconcerting and disorienting, just as plumbing your own past can be unsettling.

"It's a meaning-of-life kind of game," says Braid designer Jonathan Blow. "Everything about our daily lives that we consider meaningful is predicated on the difference between past and future.
...

Roberts also says that unlike most game makers, who test-market their games incessantly, Blow wasn't trying to satisfy any particular audience. Rather, he felt driven to make the game, if for no other reason than to please himself.

Xbox's 'Braid' A Surprise Hit, For Surprising Reasons (npr.org)

What's interesting to me here is not so much the game itself as the drives at work in the person who created it.

short essay on art and faith in The New Yorker

I really enjoyed Winter Light (by Tobias Wolff).

"We like to think of our beliefs, and disbeliefs, as founded on reason and close, thoughtful observation. Only in theory do we begin to suspect the power of aesthetics to shape our lives."

where cliché meets reality

Found this artist's pic of lovers lane, strangely relevant.


Cliche reality by ~emoglasses on deviantART