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The Myth of Sisyphus
an essay by Michael McIrvin
When I was young, in my twenties, an older writer friend asked me wistfully if I thought that I would ever be “written out,” fall silent. He had achieved early success, publishing a couple of novels and a poetry collection, and he held a creative writing professorship based on these accomplishments. I had suspected that this devoted and talented writing teacher had himself been silent for some time, but I was young, brazen and naïve, and answered too quickly: No. Unequivocally, no. I told him that writing was a way of being, a combustible combination of sex and religion and politics, an interaction with the world, and to fall silent would be to die. He was a gracious man, and I am sure he forgave me my tactless exuberance in the face of his despair, but my explanation for my answer was not wrong, and indeed this is how I have lived.
However, every writer hits the wall, laments that what he/she puts on the page merely defiles the trees cut down to make the paper. Pound despaired, but his famous ego let him stave it off until old age: “I have tried to write a paradise.” And almost immediately following these lines he fell just as famously silent until the end of his days. Williams also despaired in Paterson (“Give it up. Quit it. Stop writing. / …You will never / separate that stain of sense…”), but he also found his way through in that same long poem (although he tells us that “the language is worn out,” and therefore, “the words will have to be rebricked up…” in the process). Crane despaired while still in his 30s and jumped ship. As Williams rather ungraciously said of him: Crane failed to find a form to sustain him. And Williams was right, of course.
Camus used the myth of Sisyphus to explain why humans do anything at all, a move many an existentialist was required to make. After all, if life is absurd, as surely it is in the face of eternity, then why go on? Camus’ ultimate assertion in this regard can perhaps be summed up in a single word: respite. Sisyphus may have been sentenced by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity (the gods who seemed to love nothing more than a good one-liner repeated ad infinitum, surely laughing until their ethereal sides ached each time the rock rested for a split second at the top of the hill before tumbling back to where it had started in a cloud of preternatural dust), but Camus says that Sisyphus had precisely this moment, as the boulder rolled away again and he was the butt of a cosmic joke, to watch it roll and the dust rise, to watch birds flying and to feel the breeze drying the moisture from his flesh, the sun sweet upon his face. Then came the descent, somehow a noble act in spite of its inevitability, and beginning his labors again.
Camus was only partially right. We all need respite, rest, those few moments we are allowed to collect our energy for the next trial, the next big rock we must push up the hill, but it is in large part the work itself that gives us purpose. It is the strain of our muscles against the granite, against gravity, the weight of our flesh balanced in our shoes, the perspiration in our eyes and on our lips; and this is true whether our boulder is a novel or a poetry collection, whether it is a wall to be set, timing to be adjusted, a brief to be filed, or a semester to be taught.
Lest you think that I am waxing pathetically Hallmarkian in response to Camus’ far bleaker assessment of this myth — however true the trite might be sometimes (i.e., ‘Tis the journey that must give one joy… and etc.) — the point here is that writers tend to be perverse in this regard. The mechanic knows that there will be another car and another, the carpenter that there will be more houses, the lawyer that there will be more people to defend and the teacher more students to be taught; but the poet, the fiction writer, asks: will there come a time when I am “written out?” At the top of the hill, there is a moment of panic mixed with despair, fear that the boulder will not roll to the bottom of the hill again, that there will be no more pushing, and we will be left with nothing but the memory of the struggle, the smell of our body’s labors in the air as we watch the sun move through the clouds on the very round we had talked on against, the reason we pushed. We can only stand silent, as the birds travel south in a line, then back north, then south…
Viewed another way, if the boulders we push as writers represent instantiations of that larger rock of literature, as it in turn represents/misrepresents/approximates the human condition, as it defies death and carries the race’s naïve dreams of eternity (and even granite dissolves, given enough time), then what has driven us in part is the desire to see our handprints worn ever so slightly into its face, to find some trace of our passage in the chemical reaction of our sweat mixed with the sweat of others, our forbearers especially, mixed with the primal orthoclase and mica and quartz dust as our meager contribution. If the boulder refuses to let us push it again, if indeed we fail to find a way to make it new as Pound screamed at us is our mission (for literature is not, after all, a car or a house or someone to be defended in court or the next batch of students, but a dynamic assertion of human being), if we do not find a form to sustain us, if in essence our work is done, then we might as well submit to gravity ourselves and melt into the earth.
For as I told my despairing friend, who obviously knew it all too well, silence is death for a writer, a failure to participate in existence, a failure to serve our species in the only way we know how perhaps. I imagine myself staring hard at the rock that refuses to roll back downhill at the end of some future journey to the crest, that refuses to issue that invitation to start over, to try again, to forever push until I get it right, whatever that might mean. I imagine myself trying to will it back downhill, like my friend of all those years ago, but too tired to have any telekinetic effect — written out. I imagine myself scouring the surface of this stone for any microscopic sign of my passage, but only finding evidence of other, larger hands, more deft hands: Whitman’s and Rilke’s, Dickinson’s, Neruda’s, Blake’s, Sophocles’, Shakespeare’s, HD’s, Dante’s, Celan’s, Dickens’, Dostoevsky’s, and on and on.
But Camus was completely right on one point, one word choice: resignation. He tells us that Sisyphus, as he turned to walk back down the hill to fulfill his sentence yet one more time, resigns himself to this repetition of fulfillment and despair, to what it is to be a human being: this empty action that is nevertheless what we have to do. One day, the writer senses that the rock will not need to be pushed, and it breaks his/her heart to contemplate, but then, given our odd sense of panic at the top of the hill, resignation is also a perverse act for the writer. There will be no novels, no poems left to strain against gravity and time to achieve. Then, after scouring the granite surface of that larger rock for any chemical trace of his/her presence, of all that work, all that pushing over and over, after looking for any etching at all that is not the fault of the elements or the tracks of the masters who came before, after resigning ourselves to the silence and what it portends because this is the added step for a writer, the acceptance of failure, we bow to the rock. We say to the gods now absent from on high, the cosmic joke at our expense now without an appreciative audience, that we have offered the best we had to give.
I wish my response to my friend’s question all those years ago had been more blessing than bravado, but I offer precisely that blessing to you, dear reader, dear writer, now. It is a simple wish, the same one I have for myself: May you manage to get the boulder that is presently in front of you to the top of the hill. May you admire the script of wings against the sky, the movement in the trees, as you make your way back down the rough trail. May you begin again.
The Blue Man Dreams the End of Time
excerpt of a novel by Michael McIrvin
Chapter 1
We deny a beginning because that would imply an end, and the idea of the end, of ourselves, of time, scares the hell out of us. So, we begin in the middle. It is the American way. Other people with longer tenure on this planet can say, In the beginning. . ., or Before the time that is our time. . . . We say, Oh by the way. . ., as if everything that happens in this expanding universe, primordial starstuff blowing outward from incipience toward oblivion and everything in between, were incidental. An accident, that’s the word.
And because I have come to realize that I am quintessentially American, all foible and excuse, delusional on a good day, I start this tale with now, which is certainly the product of, the beginning of, nothing. A coincidental alignment rolling out of the confabulum of space and time to bring me to this: By the way, I woke up blue today. Not sad as in the cliché, but actually, absolutely, from head-to-toe, blue. Ultramarine, Chanelle thinks. Cerulean, says Justine.
All I know for certain is that I passed out drunk in an alley halfway between the Lucky Satyr Lounge and my apartment, and when I woke up shivering in the cold dim light before dawn, I was naked. My clothes were neatly folded in a pile by my head, my cheap, size 13 shoes resting on top with their tongues lolling like thirsty daschunds. My hands, my genitals, even the soles of my feet were a deep blue, and the cold and broken asphalt had made little blue indentations in my shoulders, ass, and legs like craters on the moon, shadows within shadows.
Before I realized my change in hue in the small light of the alley, I checked my back pocket to see if I had been robbed, a perplexing glimmer of other possible violations to my naked self beginning to surface in my imagination. All seventeen dollars I left the bar with were there, along with my comb and a map to Chanelle’s new apartment she drew for me on a bar napkin the night before. The directions are poetry: down the alley between 3rd and 4th, a silly Caucasian-titty-pink stucco story-and-half in the middle of the block, up a flight on the outside to the only door, also pink but pepto-colored.
Now, as she stands in my tiny, greasy kitchen with a cup of tea steaming between her long black hands to warm them, she worries that the “perpetrators,” as she calls whoever painted me blue, will use the map to find her, steal her stereo, rape her, maybe paint her too. Justine is sure Chanelle watches too much TV.
“Witness your use of the word perpetrators. Hell, why don’t you just call them perps, or alleged perps. TV is making you paranoid, girl.”
“There ain’t no alleged about it,” says Chanelle. “Poor Sonny is blue, isn’t he? Not allegedly blue. That crap is for weak-kneed liberals.” Chanelle puts one hand on her hip and leans slightly forward, as she always does when she is about to wag her index finger in her sister’s direction and make a not necessarily cogent point she thinks so obvious that it’s a major tenet of native wisdom.
“You’re guilty, or you’re not; and a man is blue, or he isn’t.” She smiles smugly and Justine rolls her eyes, as she always does when its obvious her sister has settled into a final certainty no matter the violence to reason.
I sleep with both women, but one at a time. The only thing they agree on to my knowledge is that all of us in one bed would be a “perversion.” I met them just over a year ago at the Lucky Satyr where Justine serves drinks. She took me home one night when I couldn’t take my eyes off of her beautiful ass in the ruffles of her overly-tight uniform that accentuates everything, all those Pavlovian signs in search of a response, then I went home with her twin sister by mistake the next night. They thought it a damned funny joke to play on a drunk white man, and had probably played it on many; or so I think in my most cynical mode, but when I mentioned the possibility of, “you know, uh, us all together,” they said the word in unison, drawing out the middle syllable and their voices rising in volume and tone like school girls: perverrrRRRsion. Then they giggled until they actually hurt my feelings, which I thought impossible after all I’ve been through, and I haven’t said a word about the three of us together since.
So we have a schedule, “our arrangement” we call it when our three-way relationship is mentioned at all: Monday and Wednesday Justine stays at my little apartment over a dry cleaner, Tuesday and Thursday Chanelle stays, and Friday through Sunday I sleep at one of their places or the other, alternating weeks, like a kid in a complex custody arrangement.
Just because you sleep with somebody doesn’t mean they have the right to laugh at you when you’re blue.
“Know what happened to Little Boy Blue when he grew up?” Chanelle asks Justine, her eyes sparkling at me like fourth-of-July rockets. “He became a drunken Seven-Eleven clerk, changed his name to Sonny so people would stop asking him to blow that damned horn, and he got bluer and bluer.”
“I heard Boy Blue’s mama warned him he’d turn darker and darker if he didn’t stop playing with his pee-pee, but he wouldn’t listen,” says Justine, laughing at her own joke.
“I heard she told him if he slept with black women it’d rub off. If we were triplets, he’d be indigo.” The sisters fall into each other’s arms with laughter, tears flowing heartlessly down their cheeks.
I am wondering how to become unblue. I have already taken a half dozen showers, hoping that an onslaught of hot water and hard scrubbing will at least fade me to something like gray, a sign I will be my pale self eventually. But soap hasn’t lightened me a shade, and the Ajax I used just now left me severely chafed, which seems to add to these women’s enjoyment. I return to the molding bathroom to stare into the mirror at the abomination of my face (bluer than Krishna’s, I think), to consider my options in some semblance of peace. I am due at work by noon, which requires either a cure or calling in sick again. It’s likely that the just-beyond-acne kid who is the manager, Bob something-or-other, will fire me this time. Lately, I just can’t stand the thought of waiting on morons who don’t know which self-service pump they got gas from or delinquents who have $20 worth of store merchandise stuffed in their pants (like I care) or some minimal semblance of a human being screaming-pissed because the milk he bought yesterday is rancid already as if his sanity depended on this retribution against a minor functionary in the corporate infrastructure who couldn’t do anything about his dilemma should he want to, so I call in sick and go to the bar instead.
An angry contusion is trying to force its way through the blue darkness of my left cheek, where I used the Ajax hardest, panicking when I realized that this may not be something applied to my skin as a prank, that this blueness might be systemic. A wave of unmitigated horror, tinged with an awed appreciation for the multiply leveled irony in my blueness, is pushing its way to the surface, too. It’s been a long time since I looked over my shoulder every few minutes, since I fled from job to job at least monthly, and town to town nearly as often, for fear they’d somehow trace my fake social security number back to me, for fear that the thin shield of my various aliases would crumble like tinfoil.
But who else would do this, use something on me both reprehensible and, as Justine and Chanelle’s reactions only hinted at, funny in a macabre way, in that darkly ironic way that seems to characterize the age? Who else? If they only knew, the sisters would probably appreciate the scope of the joke, the time and energy it must have taken to produce an agent just for me so I can fully appreciate its seemingly cosmic scale, so I can completely grasp the fate rolling at me like a train sans brakes just before it runs me down. So much for beginning in the middle, for coincidence, accident. But the hand of fate is not cosmic, but very human, in this case, if my fears are correct.
Fate. I consciously stopped using the word years ago, because it can’t exist except as a sum of random forces. The cosmic dice roll and one of an infinite number of permutations is, momentarily or for the duration of one’s life depending on scope and context, fact; and a life only looks like a whole thing, something that could have been scripted, after the bleakest of facts, when you’re worm shit. You are simply born what you are, when you are, to whom; which is to say you are born a bundle of peptides twisted just so into class X, untouchable or Brahmin, slave or master, into nation Y in the first or third world the existential albatross or the existential brass ring just like that, random as a lightning bolt. All subsequent permutations are the result of human interaction, the force of the impact as we run headlong into other lives and careen off in some other direction as circumscribed by those first factors, as circumscribed by the simple facts of one’s birth. No, Einstein would not have dreamed relativity if he were born into a Guatemalan slum. He would have seen God in the same equation of the universe that falls just short of the unified field, a half-baked God in an impoverished Guatemalan version of Nirvana, and he probably would have gone mad. No, I would never have dreamed myself a hero if I were born anywhere but in America, land of the ostensibly free and the brave only when absolutely necessary or utterly deluded.
When I was a young man, I had a strident sense of destiny. I knew without doubt that the universe had something in store for me, a heroic role to play in the grander scheme that I could barely touch with my mind, like groping in the dark for something you can run your fingertips over but can’t identify as vegetable or mineral. In my delusion, I intuited that I was somehow special, but I couldn’t quite bring to the full light of consciousness exactly why or how. Then came my fall and subsequent banishment. And even then, like Oedipus after he knew he’d killed the king but had no idea he’d killed his old man, I was stupid enough to think that I simply hadn’t discovered what I was to do in this world, even rationalized that “my mistake,” the reason for my dismissal, had been somehow foreordained, was woven into the fabric of the universe itself and therefore was meaningful on the largest possible scale. Two men had not merely died, or hell the hundred men and women and children had not merely died at these blue hands, but the world had inched closer to its own destiny, a blossoming into fulfillment that required this sacrifice and penance. What crap. My so-called fate has always been engineered by men, men with power or men who are merely petty bastards like Bob what’s-his-name, just men, and this blueness may be the final proof.
Justine is giggling at the closed door, telling me that she and Chanelle are sorry if they hurt my feelings. “Go away,” I tell her. “I think I may be ill. I’ll be out in a minute.” She walks away and there is a burst of female laughter from the kitchen. It’s wonderful to be loved.
Chanelle is probably more right than Justine, ultramarine. The blue is darker than my eyes, which are closer to azure, sky blue, but I’m not as dark as the nearly purple Chevy I drove in high school. The color on my body is just as immaculately even, however. The wrinkles at my eyes are as blue in the valleys as at the peaks. I have a day’s growth of beard, which makes the color appear to be deeper at my cheeks, where I’m going soft around the jowls, where the stubble remains dark, but it’s an illusion of contrast. At my temples the gray looks snow-white because of the deep blue background.
I look at my cock when I take it out to pee, which is the exact same shade as the hand that holds it, as my face in the mirror a moment ago. I can’t stand to look long and close my eyes, miss the toilet to the left for a second, and open my eyes again to readjust my aim. Who else could have devised this agent just for me, just for the joke that is another man’s terror?
Before I was Sonny the drunken Seven-Eleven clerk, before dozens of other names I culled from obituary columns and then enacted as I had been trained, before they threw me out for what they called “my mistake,” my code name was Blue. As in sad, but also faithful true blue like an old dog named Blue, as in heavy-hearted music played by John Lee Hooker, as in outa-the-blue, blue Monday, blue skies, bluebells, faded blue jeans and a Chevy so blue it was almost purple with blue interior and discarded blue panties to reveal the magic pink passage beneath a blue dress.
That was my problem at the Agency. I was a romantic in a world of cold-blooded killers incapable of poetry, unless you consider the condensed lingo of the trade, the blood-stained words that represent an entire body of macabre knowledge, poetry. Never mind that I became one of them; somehow I stayed a romantic even after the bitter end. It’s all in the name I picked the day I lost my virginity, as they called it, the day I played my first solo and took out a Colombian diplomat suspected of being a Communist drug runner. Suspected by whom and based on what evidence no one ever said, and I didn’t expect them to tell me anything but the target and the date of his exit to the Underworld.
Only later did I figure out that the Company never cared about the latter charge, not then and not now. In fact, being killed for running coca must be one of those bleak jokes at the agency these days, since the boys in the Company have made money that way themselves to finance a covert war, if the news reports from a few years after my departure are to be believed. Maybe it’s accepted as a business thing, taking out the competition, maybe it was even then, even as the man’s windpipe buckled in my hand and he gaped like a posturing orangutan at the zoo and his eyes bulged and he went nearly as blue as I am now. Or maybe the war on drugs on foreign shores just gives the foot soldiers in the agency something to do these days, blood and maneuvers to keep them occupied and to keep the machine of covert operations greased, an omnivorous hand-made clock finely tuned and blood-hungry. Just in case.
The Columbian’s alleged politics is of course the biggest joke these days. Castro is in his Cuba, but everywhere else in the world reeks of Capitalism. And maybe even Cuba is tainted with market incentives and the profit motive by now. I really don’t pay attention to geopolitics much these days. But that is the charge that made it OK in my own mind to kill the man: my raison d’être, his raison d’mort. It wasn’t about economics then, not explicitly, which is maybe the greatest act of legerdemain ever performed to associate closed markets with evil in the popular imagination, to convince the hero that he serves good no matter how evil his tactics.
That day in the back of a limousine with tinted windows, in a perverse right-of-passage for which my fellow agents slapped me on the back and bought me drinks when I returned to the States, I became agent Blue, and the name became part of an elaborate illusion wherein I could believe I had become a hero and the Agency could forget I am a man. After all, the hero is always incognito, pretending to be just a man until he dons his other identity and his true name, something elemental and beyond the understanding of common human beings, those who are not heroes, who might condemn the hero’s methods as too brutal, too inhumane, if they only knew. And my handlers could punch in the instructions for the next mission, encode them in my synapses, as into a machine.
My code name also became part of an elaborate misunderstanding between the Agency and me. It was not the name itself, but the differences between what we heard in it. It was only during my excommunication that I realized that my colleagues didn’t hear my name the same way I did. For them blue was part of a football cadence, blue-31-hut-HUT, or the color of a fast and brutal car with no panties or other trappings of a life, or the word was short for the infamous blue streak that all fast talkers are capable of, or the color of a gun barrel. Or blue was past tense for blow: she blew me and I blew her away. Or blue was the color of suffocating men, men with smashed windpipes, Colombian diplomats who run drugs and stupidly call themselves Communists in a hemisphere patrolled by cowboys in dark glasses who will make sure the profit goes to one of us, a Norte Americano, or to nobody.
The day I figured this out, the company heard my name the way I heard it, and consequently that was my last day as an operative, an agent, a spook, a cowboy riding the geopolitical range in the clandestine service of America, a hero. It was the end of our misunderstanding, but not the end of the illusion, which is of course just a diminished version of that larger illusion the powers-that-be perpetrate upon us all like a perverse Platonic paradigm. The illusion in my case is stronger than most people’s reality, which is to say than their version of the illusion, which is the crux of the joke. Today, I woke up concretely, absolutely, from head to toe, blue. I could almost laugh.
Poems
by Michael McIrvin
Crazy Woman Canyon
On a river crooked as a man’s walk from broken love
to broken love, toward blood-ties sundered
and his bones buckled under the hooves of deer
a hundred years hence, tree swallows
skim the water, grace in the service of hunger.
The ghost of a madwoman wanders this canyon
afraid to stop singing lest her throat fill
with Mayflies and silence, her song a miracle
of longing that stretches like fingers into dread. The sun
wanes among the scrub willow and pasqueflowers,
and the trout I carry on a stripped twig stare
blank-eyed, the blue too strange to be home,
green-winged alien cousins swimming there, swooping
up from the margin between the mundane world
and the illusion of heaven. She invites me to lie here,
and I imagine the moon, already ascending, heedless
as it sails over and over and over the water... Coyotes
wail grace somewhere downriver, and the mad one,
alone in her grief for a century, picks up the chorus,
a song of welcome rising from ten thousand diaphanous
wings on her lips, a map to her in their striations,
instructions for how to love a ghost in the complex
rhythms of so many in the falling light. Rainbow
rise to peek at their dead kin, and I turn
toward the canyon rim, the coyotes
now focused on their meal, the woman
returned to her weeping.
Sacred Ground
for Sharon
This news came one March dawn
as I lay dying, melting
into the ground in that slow
fashion for which I am famous:
the lines in my forehead are a road map
to Hell, a vestigial urge to believe
fallen short a thousand miles,
but your wrists are ladders to a different world,
charts of rivers from which no man has sipped
nor will ever dip his finger in for the slightest taste,
divine water of the sundered heavens
laid on end through a hole in time,
escape route denied a madman like me.
It came to me that daylight is the obedient
door that opens precisely there,
at the confluence of your hand and arm
you dream are feathered, the better
to take you to another world
where a sweeter light circles you
and you never sleep.
Then this revelation as I rose to walk
into the sun: love can be roused
by something so simple as light
falling along a wrist, the sacred
ground between a river and a wing.
Note that all of the work on this page has been previously published in one venue or another, but copyright belongs to Michael McIrvin. Please contact him for permission to reprint.
****For your free initial consultation and price quote for editing services or a critique, please contact Michael McIrvin at mcirvinm@earthlink.net or visit A-1 Complete Writing and Editing's Home Page or Pro Novel Editing Services for more information. Join our long list of satisfied clients today.
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