The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010) (29 page)

With Tolstoy, late urgency made him break out of literature completely into works with baldly questioning titles such as
What Is Religion?, What Is Art?, What To Do?
and, even more relevant in the contemporary world, ‘Why Do People Stupefy Themselves?’ And, when he did write fiction, the stories are full of bitter, questioning characters bewildered in the face of extinction.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
is a study of the consequences of denial. Ilyich is a magistrate who has lived only for status and comfort, ‘pleasantly’ and ‘decently’, insulated by habit and banality, but is struck down by an unexpected fatal illness and is obliged to die alone, excluded by the conventional life he himself has always espoused. His wife and daughter can’t wait to get rid of him to resume their social lives and his colleagues see his death only as a promotion opportunity. Entirely lacking outer or inner resources, Ilyich dies ‘after three days of incessant screaming’.
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In poetry there was W.B. Yeats whose late subjects included ‘A Crazed Girl’ and ‘The Wild Old Wicked Man’, who claimed that only lust and rage could spur the old into song and who posed the rhetorical question, ‘Why should not old men be mad?’ As with Picasso, Yeats’s imagination grew stronger and wilder as his physical powers declined:

What shall I do with this absurdity –

O heart, O troubled heart – this caricature,

Decrepit age that has been tied to me

As to a dog’s tail?

Never had I more Excited, passionate, fantastical

Imagination, nor an eye and ear

That more expected the impossible –
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In one of his finest late poems, ‘Lapis Lazuli’, Yeats ponders on three old Chinese men carved in stone: ‘Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes ⁄ Their ancient, glittering eyes are gay’.
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Always solemn and humourless, Yeats himself could never abandon the grand manner and be gay, but he recognized that gaiety was an inspiring feature of Eastern culture. The Western late style is most often angry, discontented and bitter, even despairing, but the Eastern version, while just as defiantly rejecting convention and cherishing independence, prefers humour, zest and delight.

Here is the painter Hokusai, a major influence on Monet, who owned one of his works and took from him the idea of the obsessively repeated subject (for example in
One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji
): ‘At seventy-three I learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence when I am eighty, I shall have made more progress, at ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at a hundred I shall certainly have reached a marvellous stage; and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it but a dot or a line, will be alive. Written at the age of seventy-five by me, once Hokusai, today Gwakio Rojin, the old man mad about drawing.’
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What an anthology could be compiled of defiant, zestful, self-sufficient Eastern old age! For instance, Tu Fu’s ‘Returning Late’:

Holding a candle in the courtyard, I call for two Torches. A gibbon in the gorge, startled, shrieks once.

Old and tired, my hair white, I dance and sing out. Goosefoot cane, no sleep…
Catch me if you can!
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The Happy Ending

The Happiness of Absurdity

A
mong the many disturbing discoveries of the twentieth century was the revelation that life is essentially absurd. Kafka was the first to develop this idea. In his quest stories, the quest hero is constantly frustrated, always unable to gain admission to the Castle or the Law, but equally unable to abandon the quest. In other words, the search for meaning will never find meaning but must continue even so.

And, while Kafka was developing this theme in literature, physicists were coming to the conclusion that, at the weird subatomic level, nothing exists unless it is observed. So the search for the nature of reality revealed that in fact there was no reality. Werner Heisenberg, discoverer of the uncertainty principle, declared in despair that nature itself was absurd.

In philosophy Camus compared the human condition to the fate of Sisyphus, condemned to push a rock up a hill again and again for all time. An absurd fate – but Camus insisted that Sisyphus could be happy.

Then Beckett added a new twist – a quest saga without a quest. In
Waiting for Godot
his pair of tramps, modern men, are too lazy and incurious to go on a journey in search of meaning. Instead they just hang about waiting for meaning to come to them. Godot was bound to turn up soon, they repeated endlessly, while knowing in their hearts that he never would. For Beckett this absurdity was hilarious.

And mordant laughter seems the only possible response. There is no way back to certainty, simplicity and innocence, only the way forward into confusion, uncertainty and knowingness. The gasp of wonder becomes the sardonic bark of disbelief. Absurdity is the new sublime.

The good news is that, while other resources are dwindling, absurdity is multiplying and flourishing and filling the earth. There are ever more bizarre ways of passing the time while waiting for Godot. For instance car-park attendant Bob Prior honours the quest from the comfort of his own home by devoting all his spare time to making
Star Trek
sets and characters from Rice Krispies packets.
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It’s the Rice Krispies detail that makes this story sublime. Scorning mere scale models, Elvis-impersonator James Cawley has given ten years and $150,000 to building a full-sized replica of the bridge of the
Starship Enterprise
in his garage.
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For sporty types demanding engagement and spectacle, there is competitive eating, a new sport but with its own official body, the IFOCE (International Federation of Competitive Eating), which establishes world records and rankings and oversees contests, disqualifying any competitor who has a ‘Roman incident’ as a consequence of ‘urges contrary to swallowing’. As Brazil dominates soccer, so Japan dominates competitive eating and the current world champion is Takeru ‘The Tsunami’ Kobayashi who has eaten 53 hot dogs in 12 minutes (and 18 pounds of cow brains in 15 minutes). Other top gastro-athletes include Carl ‘Crazy Legs’ Conti who downed 168 oysters in 10 minutes, Oleg Zhornitskiy who got through four 32-ounce jars of mayonnaise in 8 minutes and Don ‘Moses’ Lerman who consumed 7 quarter-pound butter sticks in 5 minutes. Just to think about this last feat could give the average eater a Roman incident. But even Competitive Eating has its paradox – all the top eaters are slim. Kobayashi weighs only 131 pounds.

For those of artistic temperament, contemporary art offers splendidly absurd opportunities. Major publicly funded institutions have paid an artist to exhibit his girlfriend’s used sanitary towels, another to hire sprinters and organize a series of them running through an art gallery every thirty seconds, and a third to film himself abseiling down a studio wall, naked except for a titanium ice screw in his rectum. Tate Britain has invested over £30,000 of taxpayers’ money in ‘Monochrome Till Receipt (White’), which is a supermarket shopping receipt for items such as boil-in-the-bag rice, pickled eggs, sanitary towels and swing-bin liners. Though the bin liners may be artist’s materials. One of the artist’s enigmatic previous works, possibly a self-portrait, was a black bin liner filled with air.

For the politically minded, there is the possibility of becoming the leader of the Western world by saying things like, ‘They mis-underestimated me’, ‘People say I’m indecisive, but I don’t know about that’, ‘One has a stronger hand when there’s more people playing your same cards’ and ‘I know the human being can coexist peacefully with fish’.
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Who would not rejoice to live in a century where such things are possible? Lord, what fools these mortals be!

Surely business at least is too hard-headed for absurdity? Not a bit of it. Major corporations have paid large sums to a management guru who describes himself as ‘the leading world authority on creative thinking’ and claims that, ‘without wishing to boast’, his latest system is ‘the first new way of thinking to be developed for 2,400 years since the days of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle’. Known as the ‘Six Thinking Hats’, this system requires managers to don a red hat for proposing a project, a yellow hat for listing its advantages, a black hat for its disadvantages and so on. But, as well as coloured hats, investors in the system get the aphorisms of the greatest thinker since Socrates: ‘You can’t dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper’, ‘With a problem, you look for a solution’ and ‘A bird is different from an aeroplane, although both fly through the air’.
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Inspired by this wisdom, the entrepreneur can discover many absurd ways to make money. For instance, by selling dirt. Not the figurative dirt of pornography – actual dirt. Alan Jenkins, an Irish immigrant to the USA, has become a multimillionaire by selling 12-ounce plastic bags of Official Irish Dirt. Like all astute businessmen, Jenkins offers substantial discounts for bulk purchasing. For instance, he has provided a Galway-born Manhattan lawyer with enough Irish dirt to be buried in – for the very reasonable round figure of $100,000 – and, for only $148,000, he has delivered to a Corkman several tons of Irish dirt to serve as a secure foundation for his new American home. It seems that the twenty-first century has added a new stage to the immigrant experience: after getting established and sending for the family, send for the native dirt. Jenkins now has a Jewish counterpart in Steven Friedman, founder of Holy Land Earth, which imports Israeli dirt bearing an official seal of approval from Rabbi Velvel Brevda, director of the Council of Geula in Jerusalem. There is an obvious opportunity for importing Islamic dirt from Mecca – but a true visionary will see the global possibilities and set up International Sacred Soil to send dirt from everywhere flying to everywhere else.

And clear-headed science is as absurd as hard-headed business. The search for the nature of reality leads ever deeper into absurdity. It is difficult to know now which is more absurd – the micro or the macro, the physics of the atom or the physics of space.

At first the atom was only a nucleus surrounded by electrons and only the electron was weird. Like a modern bisexual, it could be a particle one moment and a wave the next, depending on who was making eyes at it. And, like a modern celebrity, it did not exist at all if no one was looking. This was disturbing, but at least the nucleus was as solidly dull and dependable as a GP in a market town. Then the supposedly solid nucleus was found to teem with weird particles. It was a particle zoo. No, these were all actually the same particle – the quark. So there are only two elementary particles, the electron and the quark. Except that there are two heavier electrons, the muon and tau, and six types of quark – up, down, strange, charm, top and bottom (sometimes known as truth and beauty). There are also superquarks known as squarks.

And, apparently, atoms, which should be the basis of everything, account for only about 4 per cent of the universe. The other 96 per cent is missing – but it is probably 25 per cent dark matter and 75 per cent dark energy. The scientists explain gravely that there is not enough gravity. Dark matter is certainly no laughing matter.

Even the void, the last cloister, is no longer chaste. It appears that emptiness is not empty and stillness is not still. The firmament is a ceaseless churn of matter turning into antimatter and back again. Even matter itself is incorrigibly unstable and restless, endlessly trying to become its opposite and then dissatisfied with that too.

And the weird micro is weirdly mixed up with the weird macro due to a weird phenomenon known as quantum entanglement, which means that a quantum event on earth may instantly change things in some distant galaxy.

But the galaxies do not appear to be keen on entanglement. Apparently the stars are fleeing from us ever more rapidly. And who could blame them after their first contact with humans in space? The most spectacular and absurd quest in human history was the landing of men on the moon. Not even Kafka and Beckett working in collaboration could have come up with such a sublime fable. This event initiated so many of the key features of the age – the new privileging of image over content (the landing offered no benefits other than pictures, but the pictures were more valuable than the moon rock), of differentials over absolute values (the USA’s real purpose was to land on the moon before the USSR), and of means over ends (men went to the moon to show that it was possible to go to the moon).

This was also the first global media event and the apotheosis of modern technology. Almost 600 million people watched on TV, none aware of the frailty of the technology or how close it came to failing. The lunar module overshot its landing site and the navigational computer, which had less power than a contemporary mobile phone, developed a double hernia under the strain, producing the error message ‘1202’, a message no one had ever seen before. Imagine tearing across the surface of the moon, with the fuel gauge reading close to zero, and being offered as the solution 1202. Men with a philosophical bent might have interpreted this message as conclusive proof that God has a great sense of humour. But the astronauts had neither the inclination nor the time for such thoughts. Neil Armstrong had to assume manual control and watch impossibly rocky terrain rush past as the fuel ran out. With just ten seconds of fuel left he found an area flat enough to land on.

The 600 million watched and waited. And waited. Was Neil surveying the terrain, checking the equipment or agonizing over his first words? Perhaps he was overcome by terror at his insignificance in the cosmos? None of these. Neil was doing the dishes, tidying up. An orderly man, he spent the weekend before the flight dismantling and reassembling his dishwasher at home.

Eventually Neil emerged, followed by Buzz Aldrin, who lingered for what seemed like an eternity on the steps of the module. Was Buzz more sensitive than his companion to cosmic terror and awe? No, he had merely paused to enjoy a piss. And this may have been a rebellious act, like deliberately peeing in a swimming pool, because Buzz was originally supposed to be first out and was still unhappy at being demoted. So when he eventually got down on the moon and was ordered to photograph Neil he refused, with the excuse that he was ‘too busy’
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– and the only photograph of Neil on the moon is the one taken by Neil himself showing his reflection in his companion’s visor. This is another example of the power of differentials and the negativity bias. As one of his fellow astronauts put it, Buzz resented not being first more than he appreciated being second. In fact, he had achieved unique distinction – he was the first and probably the only man to huff on the moon (and, better still, he got his crap hot in the Sea of Tranquillity).