Some kind of disconnect

"I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent."
~ Samuel Beckett's Endgame

This line is spoken in a depressing, Absurd, mess of a play but to me it reads like a plea from a sad and beautiful love story. No such luck. Can I rip it off and use it some time? Would that be the ultimate blasphemy to Beckett: using his dialogue in some fluffy piece of chick lit? If so, then I'm in. Samuel Beckett, I spit upon you and your crazy Modernism. Roll over in your grave! Go ahead!

Here is a cheesey example, just off the top of my head, to get the corpse rolling, so to speak:

Cassandra clutched at his sleeve. "You cannot leave me, Fernando. I love you."
He pulled away and fixed her with a heartless stare. "Love. How can you speak of love?"
Again, she grabbed at him. She needed an arm, a hand- anything to keep him from leaving. "I know what I feel."
"It means nothing. Love." His laugh was heartless and bitter, so different than the gentle Fernando who held her and whispered in the night.
"I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent."

Then something about a throbbing member, moonlight, and beating hearts.

Obviously, if I do use the lines some day, it will be in much better writing than jotted off above. I just wanted to show the contempt I currently feel for Beckett. Ironic, I know, writing of my love for his lines and my contempt for him at the same time...I've suffered through a lot of Modern Drama this semester. I'll get over it.

Also, Happy Kafka's Birthday!

"We need the books that affect us like disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."
~ Franz Kafka

Camus Wants Me to be a Slut

Really, I'm just putting off my take home midterm with a little reflection and wishing I had more Battlestar Galactica to watch on DVD.

Yes, I've become hooked on Battlestar Galactica. Don't judge- you do geeky things, too. Also, they canceled Firefly a long, long time ago, so what's a girl to do for her 'we-are-flawed-people-hurtling-through-space' fix?

Anyway, last night in grad class was Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus. And I have to say, now that we've temporarily taken a break from the uber-depressing views of Sartre (who I loved, don't get me wrong) and Kafka, there's really something to this Absurd (capital A) stuff. Our professor keeps saying "obviously we all don't feel like this, or we couldn't be here debating these ideas", which doesn't make any sense to me. Most of the philosophical pieces we're reading are nothing but debate. Kierkegaard and Sartre admit they don't know what they're talking about- I'm pretty sure with the Absurd you can't KNOW anything- they're just tossing ideas out there.

But Camus put the Absurd into exactly the words I was looking for:
"This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world."

So how can my professor dismiss the Absurd as something his students cannot possibly feel? Doesn't everyone feel this? Not constantly. That's what drives people to despair and suicide (two very uplifting class topics). And I'm full of things the Absurd isn't so about, like: hope, a desire for romance, a longing for wealth and material possessions. But we all feel the world doesn't make sense and have a strong desire to make it make sense. Almost everything we do in life- jobs, taxes, marriage- is an attempt to put order into our world. And then something happens- 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami- to let us know that we have no control and there's no such thing as order.

Boo-yah, Professor Donaldson.

Anyway, what I really wanted to focus on in this blog was Camus' thoughts on Don Juan as an ideal man. Don Juan is a do-er, in all senses of the word. Heehee. Yes, he'll do you, too. The geeky students of the Absurd got a big kick out of that one. Don Juan loved a woman. Then he loved another woman. He didn't collect them. He never thought of the past women when he was with a new one. He lived in the moment and he constantly acted. This is the way to thrive in an Absurd universe. So says Camus.

Yup, lots of sex for all of us, as long as we aren't bogged down by regret or longing for the past or a desire for a deeper connection. And we can't lie to our partners. We can't make promises or say we love them or that they're the only one for us. This is what Sartre would call 'acting in bad faith'.

According to Camus, Don Juan is in the right, because "he loves [each woman] with the same passion and each time with his whole self that he must repeat his gift and his profound quest". The women are foolish because "each [one] hopes to give him what no one has ever given him. Each time they are utterly wrong." They want to teach him to love, but he does love. Everyone. One at a time.

"Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?"

Also, I suspect Don Juan may have attended McDaniel College and been in the theater department.

'Catharsis is for crap. I want my happy ending now.'*

“Moderation is a memory.
Dive right in and let him send me.
I could take this in doses large enough to kill.”

~ Liz Phair, Johnny Feelgood

Sartre (it always comes back to this guy), in his philosophical novel ‘Nausea’ discusses a concept called the ‘feeling of adventure’. Originally this is based on the conventional definition of the word ‘adventure’ and the main character travels the world trying to capture this feeling. Later, he decides that the feeling of adventure is really a person’s consciousness of the “irreversible march of time” and the rare moments in life when it feels that events and people are truly connected.

This is how I know I am not an existentialist (in case there was any doubt).

I always feel everything is connected to me. I am the center of my world, and if something does not relate to me, it doesn’t stick around long.

Tonight, I watched Grey’s Anatomy, like many other people across America. As usual, I paid particular attention to George. George is the character that I claim as my fictional boyfriend, while my girl friends are fighting over McDreamy and Alex (McAsshole). I like George. He is sweet. He is cute. He is kind.

And tonight, I discovered that not only do I like George; I am George.

This weekend was hard for me. I was celebrating and mourning a strange anniversary- an event that existed in a relationship that didn’t. I prided myself on my behavior regarding this past situation and how much I had grown as a person in the course of one year. I minimized my pain. I celebrated my choices.

And then on my television, George told Meredith that he would never leave her, he would never hurt her, and he would always love her. And instead of telling George something fluffy and nice about how she loved him as a friend but would never love him romantically, Meredith had sex with him.

It hurt me physically.

I know I wasn’t alone in this. I spoke to three different friends who were brimming with similar emotions. But I was the only one of us who looked at the screen and said, ‘This was my life. And it hurt.’

Which is silly, right? Because it’s just a tv show.

But like I said: everything relates to my life. So when other people’s pain reminds me of my own, it’s my pain, too.

Grey’s Anatomy is a greek tragedy for the modern world. It’s cathartic. Sometimes I cry, and then I judge myself for the tears.

The Ancient Greeks didn’t judge themselves.

I guess what this convoluted, cathartic (yeah, I’m writing away my pain) entry has finally twisted itself down to is this:

Let’s not dismiss television. Let’s not say it’s rotting our brains out of our heads. The Greeks had their tragedies, full of downfall of Gods and Royalty. We’re a post-existentialist democracy. We don’t have Gods and Royalty. But we put doctors on a pretty high pedestal. So when their fictional fall makes us cry, it’s good and cleansing. I refuse to feel silly about it.

*title quote attributed to this erudite young woman.