RETRO READING: CAMUS

Re-read Camus’ The Fall, probably the first time since the 1980s. I read it first around 1974, I think, and it was part of the background I draw on when I recall my high school reading. The formative stuff. My recollection of it—the bar, the quays, the bridge—played a part in the initial “Axis and the Fallen Angel” composition of around ’76 or so. Reading The Fall now, I see in it the seeds of my conviction, fully ignited by reading Nietzsche in those days, that the purpose of life was a kind of mental clarity about one’s state—I suppose I would’ve accepted “spiritual state” as a good enough phrase for what I had in mind. Key to that intention was a need to do away with the teachings of the Catholic church in the name of something else.

In The Fall, the speaker’s insistence on judgment—to give it and to escape it—plays into that need. One could accept that one would be judged “sinful” by the arbiters of that law one was raised with, but the effort was to free oneself of that view, to find another way. The greatest risk was that one had wasted one’s time, one had squandered one’s gifts—and life, with whatever talents and intelligence one possessed, was the chief gift. One was indebted, from the start, but how to repay that debt? For the artist, the way was clear, in a sense: use one’s talents to the best of one’s ability. But there one encounters a question: how do we determine “best use,” how do we understand—or even perceive or conceive—what “talent” compels? It becomes “a blessing and a curse,” as the song says; it becomes a test of one’s mettle all along the way. One reason I want to go back to the scene of starting out is because I want to see again where I went wrong—but, even more so, I want to reshape the past for the sake of the present and possibly for a different future.

Returning to The Fall interests me because I know that the speaker’s insistence that “we need slavery” is something I grasped at some basic level back then—in two senses. One was with Rimbaud’s “we are slaves, let us not curse life.” A complex statement that says our slavery is built into the system we serve. We have our assigned tasks and we let them determine our identities, to a large extent. We are given money for this and so we cease to call it slavery—we are “free,” we say, to choose. But if we are honest, we know how little choice we have. Somewhere in that notion, as I received it, was Nietzsche’s “What, a great man? I see rather the play-actor of his own ideal.” That line, to me, undermined even the unique life of the artist or leader. Such figures were still slaves to an ideal, an intention, that governed them. We might wade through the biographies of everyone whom talent or wealth or wisdom supposedly freed until we come at the moment when they are ruled by something—call it love, call it God, call it need, call it—maybe even—justice. It doesn’t matter. It’s an ideal that shapes that person’s acts, making them, at best, an actor—pretending they “have it,” the ideal—at worst, a puppet, an automaton compelled by the ideal to—and here’s where Camus comes in—make excuses. For we all fail our ideal. And so must own up to it, or take it out on others. “No excuses ever, for anyone; that’s my principle at the outset. I deny the good intention, the respectable mistake, the indiscretion, the extenuating circumstance. With me there is no giving of absolution or blessing . . . .  In philosophy as in politics, I am for any theory that refuses to grant man innocence and for any practice that treats him as guilty. You see, in me, très cher, an enlightened advocate of slavery.”

So we come to the other sense of slavery—as the state of those who require masters, or a master. In other words, the Hegelian master/slave dichotomy. To me, coming from Catholicism, God was the ultimate master and we his slaves because he owned us—having created us for his own reasons. The Christian sense of this debt was simply that we should love Him, worship Him, do His bidding to the extent we could perceive it. But if that master is removed, then mastery itself becomes the task: to master oneself, to make of oneself a master to be loved. To the master who achieves this, perhaps, the mass of mankind would willingly be a slave. But the master? What kind of freedom is his? It’s the kind of freedom (from masters) that Camus’ Clamence calls “a chore . . . a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.” The master enslaved to his mastery.

This is not only the artist enslaved to his own ideal of mastery—of, perhaps, preaching a message to the masses via art—but also the task which Camus will imagine as the rock of Sisyphus. Pushing the rock up the slope, Sisyphus masters gravity; letting it roll to the bottom and pursuing it, he masters himself. But he is eternally enslaved to that struggle. There’s no freedom through tasks. Freedom from all tasks—that, I suppose, was the tact I took. The freedom simply to Be. To be, not only as “finale of Seem,” but Be as the only acceptable slavery. For one must exist. Camus also argues for the acte gratuit of suicide, as a gesture of mastery of the moment, and over life itself—which some find, no doubt, in the taking of other lives. But it should be clear that in the philosopher’s oubliette—or what Camus’ speaker calls “the little-ease” (a medieval torture confinement)—we are only concerned with the life we were given. (If one lets oneself become an executioner of the life of others one is indeed defined by the task, by the fact of lives one can end until someone or something ends one’s own life. Needless to say, all such acts are distractions—as is sex and appetite—from the existential emptiness at the heart of the endeavor, any endeavor.)

Granted, art or war—or maybe the art of war—are alike in their valuing a skill set that must prove itself again and again. At some level, the exercise of these skills may be an end in itself, but don’t we—the spectators of the world historical cases these exercises establish—want something more? Some like to speak of edification, but that’s a mighty abstract idea. Don’t we want, really, a rooting interest? A sense that there are stakes and that our hero-warrior or hero-artist or hero-ruler may fail mightily or succeed greatly? But in what lies that success or failure? Renown? The eyes of the multitude upon the acts, and the judgment—always the judgment of someone from somewhere—that it was “worth the time,” “worth the candle,” worth—if it must come to it—the whole world. And into that “world” we place the crying babies of need, and the misused and abused women and men, and all those who have shackled their fortunes to the side that lost, and all those who danced in the streets with the side that won, and all those who never knew comfort and all those who squandered riches untold, and all those who struggled to improve their lot or the lot of others, and those who broke every rule and yet thrived, or who reviled their betters or abased themselves for preference, or who lived pious, quiet lives, exulting in God, or who threw all caution to the wind and gave themselves over to every sensual pleasure and pain. “All” are subsumed in this Battle Royale of one against the very principles of existence.

Thus existentialism chez Camus.

DB's Song of the Day (day 356): "REDEMPTION SONG" (1980) Bob Marley

This day—the day after solstice—in 2002 we lost the mighty Joe Strummer, former frontman for The Clash. Today’s song, by Bob Marley, is a song that Strummer recorded with his band of the early 21st century, The Mescaleros. He also recorded it with Johnny Cash, not long before the death of both (Cash died in September of 2003). The duet appears on Unearthed, a collection released posthumously in November 2003.

Marley’s version, solo on acoustic, was released on his final album Uprising; Marley died in 1981.

All of which is a way of saying that the song has a definite “late in life” feel to it, if only by association. In the case of Marley, who was already very sick by the time the album was released, it feels like a final affirmative statement, a song about dedication to a cause and about belief in the triumph of the spirit. In all the versions I mentioned, the proximity to death of the singers makes of the song a kind of last testament, “We forward in this generation / Triumphantly.”

Whether or not you see evidence of such triumph, the point of such a song is to attest to the sense of progress, to provide a rallying cry. Marley begins by describing slavery and lets the forward movement from those dark days speak for a sense of eventual emancipation. But, like Christ who was always quick to point out that the fulfillment of his talk about the “kingdom of heaven” wasn’t likely to take place in this world, nor as a political nor material advantage, Marley—borrowing from Marcus Garvey—makes a statement about the kind of incentive for change he has in mind: “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery / None but ourselves can free our minds.”

The idea recalls to me both John Lennon saying “you better free your mind instead” and Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus laughing “to rid himself of his mind’s bondage.” “Mental slavery,” we could say, is a habit of mind, a way of being chained, by your own lack of knowledge or imagination, to burdensome ways of thinking, to ignorance, to unjust, uncharitable, unenlightened views. The notion of the free play of the mind, of the mind as unshackled by its own materiality, is one of the mainstays of philosophy and of some religions. (Which recalls to me my boy Rimbaud: Par l’esprit on va à Dieu! Déchirante infortune! [Through the mind we go to God! A wrenching misfortune!])

But, whether or not our minds can lift us to God and whether or not that in itself is a form of mental slavery, I’ll leave aside at the moment. Well, maybe not. Since Marley does invoke some of that sense of fulfillment when he sings: “How long shall they kill our prophets / While we stand aside and look / Some say it’s just a part of it / We’ve got to fulfill the Book.”  The book here is the Bible or at least a prophetic tract. The idea being that the killing of prophets is something that happens regularly in “the Book” and so it’s almost pointless to inveigh against it as it seems to be a fulfillment of God’s plan, which “the Book” is taken to be the text of.

That kind of thinking for me, frankly, smacks of mental slavery. And what I like about a song like Marley’s, as can be found in some of the lyric utterances of Dylan or Lennon and others, is that it can support various interpretations. The intention of the song, as stated in its recurring refrain, is to invite the singing of “songs of freedom,” while the line “’Cause all I ever have / Redemption songs” makes a comparison between songs of freedom and redemption songs. They may be one and the same, or it may be that the call for freedom and the call for redemption are not always the same call.

In other words, “what profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his soul”? If “freedom” means you can do as you please and can ignore what must be done and can retain your vain pursuit of nothing but your individual happiness, then better to have “redemption”—a calling beyond “success in life” to, perhaps, action to a purpose or even simply to prayer or to utterance—as for instance songs—that can speak to the spirit and offer it a guide, a signpost, a banner even.

That, to many, is what Marley’s song is. A redemption song because its message is about the need for redemption, maybe even the promise of redemption. The point, within the tradition of the Spiritual or hymn, is simply to attest to that sense of need and promise, for without some sense of redemption the world is a much less valuable, much more limited place. It all goes back to suffering—and the trials of life—as having a purpose beyond the merely factual or purely utilitarian. And so Marley’s great late song is, in that sense, as much as anything a cry in the wilderness.

Long, long ago, the time of year of the winter solstice in the northwestern hemisphere became the time to celebrate the birth of Christ. The confluence is meaningful, as all sun myths must take stock of the shortest day and the longest night. Reason enough to sing a song of redemption and a song of birth.

My boy Rimbaud again: “Quand irons-nous, par-delà les grèves et les monts, saluer la naissance du travail nouveau, la sagesse nouvelle, la fuite des tyrans et des démons, la fin de la superstition, adorer—les premiers!—Noël sur la terre! [When shall we go, across the shores and mountains, to hail the birth of new labor, new wisdom, the flight of tyrants and demons, the end of superstition, to adore—the very first!—Christmas on earth!] How's that for redemption?

’Cause none of them-a can-a-stop-a the time

DB's Song of the Day (day 344): "AIN'T WASTIN' TIME NO MORE" (1972) The Allman Brothers Band

Back on the 8th was the birthday of Gregg Allman. I’ve already posted a song in honor of his late brother Duane, and today’s song, which appears on the Allman Brothers Band’s Eat a Peach, was recorded after Duane’s death. In fact, in the wake of that loss, it feels like a very urgent message to get on with things and not let life go to waste. “With the help of God and true friends, I’ve come to realize / I still have two strong legs, and even wings to fly.”  That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, idn’t it? And of course there were a number of famous deaths around that time to give the song more force: Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison  . . .

The song has always been one of my favorites by the ABB, in part due to Gregg’s piano and Dicky Betts’ slide guitar, but mainly because it’s got the best lyrics of any tune Gregg wrote and it has a great, bluesy, charged up vocal as well.

I first became enamored of the song around 1977 when I heard quite a bit of the Allmans, and then in 1979 I put it on a tape because I wanted the reminder of all that urgency: “Time goes by like pourin’ rain, and much faster things.” A death close to me had opened up a feeling of time being short and life utterly precarious that this song evokes quite notably. “You don’t need no gypsy to tell you why / Ya can’t let one precious day to slip by.”

And, yeah, it was easy for me to get behind such urgency in my twenties. I wanted to get on with it. Didn’t even want to waste my time going to college, sitting in classes. It was all about trying to get on a fast train that would speed along to something more worthwhile, whatever that might be. “Look outside yourself, and if you don’t see what you want / Maybe sometimes then ya don’t / But leave your mind alone—and just get high.” As Rimbaud might say, “Ha, I’ve taken too much of that!” So that’s where a lot of time got wasted: getting wasted. And then not.

Well, by and by, way after many years have gone

And all the war freaks die off, leaving us alone

We’ll raise our children in peace the way we can

It’s up to you and me, brother, to try and try again

Many years have gone, alright, since I was into this song (though I admit I’ve started listening to the Allmans a bit recently with the Mobile Fidelity release of their first album), and, though the war freaks haven’t noticeably declined, I can say that I put in my time to “raise children the way we can”—not that that’s wasting time, but it sure does take up time—but maybe it’s time to “try again” with some other means of “wasting time,” since, unlike Gregg, I don’t know what activity isn’t a waste of time.

Or maybe it’s better to see it as “killing time.” “Waste” sounds like it had some potential to be something but you squandered it. And, sure, I do feel that way about the times I’ve lived through, often enough. It’s just that I don’t know, even if I had gold records or writing awards, if I’d feel that I’d done anything more than “kill time”—which means filling the hours with activities that wear them down.

Which brings us back to the verse spoken to Miss Sally who seems to be standing around crying about nothing to do. “Go step yourself outside, look up at the stars above / Go on downtown, baby, and find somebody to love / Meanwhile I ain’t wastin’ time no more.” The point seems to be that she can go contemplate nature—those ever-inspiring stars—or go find a lover, or maybe just someone to love (could even be a pet, I guess) but meanwhile . . .  That little word said a lot to me, back then. Like, once we’ve had enough with contemplating what is and after we’ve experienced the great odyssey to, with, and for someone else, or wasting time trying to get with someone else, we might come back to something else to turn our time to. I mean, some people really are a waste of time. Get on with what you gotta do. Don't mean to be brusque, but I almost chose for today Gregg's “It's Not My Cross to Bear” from the first ABB album because that's a line I say sometimes, and, to alter my man Scrooge, it's enough for a man to know his own particular cross to bear without worrying about someone else's.

So hear us now, we ain’t wastin’ time no more / ’Cause time rolls by like hurricanes / Runnin’ after subway trains / And don’t forget the pourin’ rain—and the way he pours it on for “pour-re-rorin” let’s us know it’s really pouring (like it did yesterday), enough to fill up that dish outside the window, if you know what I mean . . .