Dealing with the outside world
Week 6: Experimenting with Absurdism
I’ve been outside this week: Outside myself, outside in the world. Outside is a feeling, and it’s one that I don’t particularly enjoy being aware of, but this week I’ve felt it necessary to be in the thick of it to contemplate how we should deal with outsideness.
The kind of outsideness I’m talking about deals mostly with other people and how interacting with their opinions and actions. I talk a lot of shit and do a lot of shit on the internet (and in irl), but I don’t usually let the responses penetrate nor do I let reciprocal actions come close. I keep a distance to analyze, but being up close to shit gives you a layer of understanding that distant observation can’t.
I put myself out like bait to try and decide how we should live in light of the Absurd, and all I got was uncertainty. I let blows land and dealt with people I normally wouldn’t, but I also got close physically and otherwise to wonderful people and situations. I don’t think I can write about everything that’s been happening on a personal level, because I’m still processing it, but what I can say is that the best we can do is achieve some kind of social homeostasis. It’s impossible to stay in the good graces of the world while being true, and it’s devastating to stay away from the world, so when we feel ourselves being untrue, we withdraw and then when we feel the pull of the world, we step back in - and all we can do is understand that the cycle repeats without much hope for regularity.
So, the reflections I wrote this week were in response to feeling the pull of the world. With any luck, I’ll be back in my turtle shell next week. Or maybe the week after. But who knows for how long.
February 5 - The Salve of Reason
“I should like this sky, this quiet water, to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Thought Experiment: What do you feel is a part of you? What is separate from you? Flip it and think about how what is you is not, and what isn’t you is.
In this phase of discovering the Absurd, you may see yourself at a distance from others - more than you have been, but you’re in good company - we’re together at a distance. Somehow we’re together and separate at the same time.
Separation is necessary for our existence, but it is not sufficient. Even if we tried to combine, to be a cohesive unit of sameness - if we smashed ourselves down to the same particles, or 1s and or 0s, whatever we’re made of - we would find nothing in the sameness of everything. We would cease to be whatever it is that we are. So, we must be separate, but once you realize this, you can’t help but see in that corny-ass Neil de Grasse Tyson way, we’re all made up of the same shit. We can’t be entirely separate, and I think this is what’s left to figure out about existence: how do we combine and still maintain our separation?
From my perspective as a weirdo, a loner, someone who has been rejected, someone who has learned to accept her differences, separation provides a safe place to grow - where I can account for my own needs without getting entangled in the needs of others. But the more I’ve grown in separation, the more I realize how entangled everything is. When I’ve retreated to a safe, warm place and grown comfortable enough to put down roots, I find myself growing up against barriers. Even after repotting myself, I find new external obstacles. To people like me, how much the outside world matters is not immediately apparent until we’ve had time to try and separate from it - at which point we may come to see that we never fully can.
Somehow we have to see both sides of this, like Simone does. We can’t be so independent that we forget the world around us; the air we breathe depends on each other. And we can’t be so enmeshed that we cease to be separate entities. We have to know that we are the water AND see it before us. Separation isn’t possible if things are not at first the same.
February 6 - Living oddity
Thought Experiment: What are the components of your struggle? What gets you through it?
“What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation.”
— Vincent van Gogh, Letter to Theo van Gogh. Friday, 21 July 1882.
Damn. Vinny speaking to my eccentric little soul today.
It’s easy to say how others see us is not our concern, and it’s even easy to look at van Gogh’s legacy and see a cool weirdo painting in a field outside a village - unbothered.
But to live this? It’s a feat worth discussing.
Imagine a modern-day van Gogh: broke as fuck, weird as fuck, living off of a measly allowance from his only supporter, his brother, Theo. Straight bumming around Europe painting everything that caught his eye.
The intensity and paradox of his lack of success seem like huge factors in his post-humous success, but I don’t think he would have been able to lessen his struggle even if he had known what would become of his work. The struggle was his work.