Today
was Albert Camus and Immanuel Kant. God,
I love philosophy.
I know
I’ve written about Camus before, but I would guess that was about a year ago
when I was knee-deep in it. Is it just
that there’s nothing new to say philosophically in the year 2012? Or why can’t I spew thoughts about life and
angst and get paid for it? Philosophy is
no longer marketable, I guess. But Camus was fucked in the head. He (like Sartre) lost his father when he was only
a year old, and there has to be something about that in the strange path his
life took. No father-figure =
angst? But I had a really good dad, and
I’m still fucked up, so that theory doesn’t work.
Camus
offered a pretty simple premise: How do
we make meaning out of this life? He
offered three potential solutions: 1.
Kill yourself. 2. Give it all over to god. 3.
Accept the chaos and go with it.
Personally, I am not ready to kill myself, nor am I ready to hand my
life over to something which doesn’t exist, so … I’ll go with option
three. It’s a bit hard for me to accept
the chaos sometimes, though. Let me
refer (AGAIN) to Bruce when I say, “I want what I want when I want it.” Chaos is both good and bad, and I want to
have control. But I’ll tell you what, my
way of accepting the chaos is to turn on the music really loud and just get down. Sometimes it’s going to be really deep Pearl
Jam that gets inside me, but other times it’s going to be a little T.I. “Why
You Wanna? all up in there. I don’t know
…
Camus’ The Stranger suggests a pretty stark
version of grief – Mersault feels nothing when his mother dies. I get that.
It’s not that I don’t love my mother, but people feel different things
when they grieve. Some people are going
to go silent, others will go get totally fucked up, and others will kick in
with the type-A personality that plans funerals and deploys wills. I would probably be either silent or fucked
up. Or maybe, if I was lucky, it would
be MY funeral, and I wouldn’t have to deal with anything. (Just kidding , suicide watchers.)
As Thom
Yorke keeps asking me, “how come I always end up where I started?” I don’t know Thom! Because I am a terrible learner,
apparently. I always seem to choose
emotional suicide over the alternative, because if I lived in my own reality, I
would slit my wrists out of abject unhappiness with my interpersonal
relationships. How about that for some
upfront honesty? If I followed Camus’
doctrine, I would have probably killed myself a long time ago. I don’t know if that’s good or bad – maybe I
should have. Wasn’t it Neil Young who
said it was better to burn out than fade away?
I’m fading.
All I
know is that these philosophers get in my brain and make me better. Defying all logic, they make me happier, just
like Florence + The Machine makes me happy when I hear the song about the boy
who builds coffins. I am Wednesday Addams,
apparently. Whatever. If it makes me okay, I don’t care what it
is. If John Mayer singing about gravity
bringing me down brings a huge smile to my face, I’m not going to argue. Find happiness where you can, even if it
seems like a kind of dark place. At
least it’s a reprieve from feeling nothing or being bored out of your
skull.
No comments:
Post a Comment