by Harvey Lillywhite
H: Thank you for agreeing to talk with me. I’m so excited to meet you. You’ve always been a kind of personal hero of mine.
S: I’m not proud of how I lived, but here in the underworld I’ve had ample time to consider. And one thing I’ve learned is that you can never accurately see another. You have no doubt read Homer, Lucretis, Ovid, and the others who have told my story. So naturally you see me through their own conceptions of me. But mostly, when you look at the lives of others, you see them as projections from your own fears and desires.
H: Are you saying that they lied about you?
S: I speak with you here in the underworld because you ask me to. Without trying to be mysterious or evasive, I must tell you that words are as dishonest as I was in life. They are shadows, and when we talk, we talk with shadows. Never forget that they are not reality.
H: Oh, it’s a Plato’s-parable-of-the-cave kind of thing? I get it.
S: No. In fact it’s somewhere near the opposite of that. But it’s a small point. Just understand that I was a man who thought he was the equal of the gods, who tricked everyone he could to his own advantage. I am not a symbol of the sun’s rising and falling. And I am not a symbol of waves swelling and crashing. I am a man in the underworld who must push a rock to the top of a mountain, knowing full well that it will fall back to the bottom. It is not man’s quest for fame or knowledge. It is my task.
H: I know you mostly from reading Camus.
S: He was clever. A champion goalie on his university football team until he got tuberculosis—an absurd fate. He could see that every philosophy was flawed for lack of a “true,” provable first principle. He understood how all philosophies are built on an artificial foundation. This he considered absurd. And it was from this reality, this lack of absolute knowledge—which leaves us in absurdity—that he fabricated his first principle: life is absurd. But once he established absurdity as the true foundation of our lives, he was ready for his own romantic flights. He was a dreamer, as most all men are.
H: As I look at my own life and feel the repetitiveness of the days, like many modern people, I think of you and your endless task. And I’m sure this a question you get asked all the time, but I’m wondering how you feel about your punishment.
S: It is an obvious question, and one I do get asked all the time, along with “what is the meaning of life,” but I’ll say that I have chosen never to answer it the same way, not because I wish to lie—in fact, I intend always to tell the truth the best way I can—but because my feelings do change and certainly the words that come to me to describe my feelings are always a little different. Luckily I have not yet memorized any speeches for these interviews—that would be a repetition I could not allow since it would mock the living reality that makes sense of life. We should appreciate the multiple shifting crossroads of shadings as we use different words to tell the same story over and over again. If there is “truth,” it dwells in those differences.
H: Like jazz.
S: Perhaps.
As we speak right now, of course, I’m descending the mountain, going back down to the plain so I can renew my labor. Some have thought that it is during these instances when my task is completed for the moment and the rock is tumbling back to the bottom of the mountain, it is then, they have said, that I have my moments of relief, my revelations, a time when I can transcend what seems to be my terrible task. But they are misguided.
Understanding my feelings about my punishment, as you call it, may not help you, unfortunately, since I am unable to die. Were I stuck in an endlessly repetitive situation for the limited days I had to be alive, I may feel very differently. You see, this endless task truly is endless. For me, there is no escape through death. Suicide, for instance, is not a consideration for me, as it might be for you. This leaves me, perhaps, less free than you. In my situation, Zeus has left me no choice, except in how I feel about what it is I do every day, forever.
H: So how do you feel?
S: You expect, no doubt, a particular adjective that might be helpful to you in your life. Perhaps you imagine that I am sad or disconsolate or angry, dispirited, or indignant, or maybe you think I have become enlightened and wise and feel a certain calm and resignation, or some mixture of these. But I can’t say that any of these words usefully describes my feelings.
The first thing you need to understand is how quiet my task is. Of course I hear the rock gnashing and scraping the earth as I push it up the mountain. But these are not human sounds. When I am pushing the rock, which is most of my time, I hear no one’s voice. I may hear a bird calling, but the spectacle of a man pushing a rock that weighs exactly as much as he does up and up and up this steep mountain seems to frighten most of the birds and animals. It’s true that sometimes I see them from the corner of my eye, watching me, silently and perhaps in awe. But I work outside the world of human voices, except for my own inner voice, which sometimes blinds me from experiencing my existence here in the underworld as fully as I might.
For me, I have given this task all my concentration. It is my choice. Given my situation, there really is no other possibility except for me to love what I do. But loving is very complex, as full of disappointment as it is fulfillment—yet this is why I love what I must do. It has taught me that my expectations have nothing whatever to do with the rock; they are completely my own invention, born of my own desires, and they teach me, more than anything else I know, about myself. At times it feels odd to me that I should come to expect anything. After all, I am Sisyphus. But I do.
At first I treated this endeavor as a game. I counted the time it took me to move the rock from one station to the next up and up the mountain. And I became like a train on a schedule. And it seemed for a while that this schedule could make sense of my life. It was something that I could control. But I soon lost faith in this control and realized that it was real only in my mind. It no longer satisfied me. Over the years I questioned my desire to seek satisfaction. Why should I appreciate only what I hope for. Even pushing this rock forever is unpredictable. Each time up the mountain is different. Sometimes it is quite easy, even pleasurable. At other times, it is full of pain. I have learned to appreciate these differences. They are the reality of my life.
So you might say that, at this moment, I feel appreciative. There’s an adjective for you.
H: What is it you appreciate exactly?
S: I pay attention. Of course I can’t ignore my expectations. But when these expectations are dashed, it no longer bothers me, Sometimes it rains. Sometimes it is hot and dry with a steady wind. There are times when it is very cold.
H: But doesn’t pushing the rock up the mountain over and over, day after day, seem absurd to you?
S: We are full of questions, all of us. I’ve heard they come from our desires, what we want from life. I myself still have questions. And questions are natural for us; there’s nothing wrong with them. But what seems wrong to me, at this moment, is that we imagine that all our questions have answers. And so many of them do seem to have real answers. But the biggest questions are difficult to answer, at best.
And I have come to believe that most of them have no answer. And without an answer everything becomes, as young Camus said, absurd. I have noticed, on the rare occasions that I speak with others, that the world has changed. For centuries the answers were more obvious—not because they were the right answers but because they could not be proved wrong. But we have become better and better, it seems, at proving the old answers wrong. And now it begins to dawn on us that there may be no answers. This, of course, leads to many strange behaviors. And, for some, a world without answers is an absurdity. What matters is what we think matters. And this is another description of how I feel at this moment.
The strain of pushing the rock is sometimes physically satisfying, as any hard manual labor can be satisfying. I am lucky to have to use my body to do this work. As you see, it has kept me in good shape. But more than that, to have a single purpose makes my life far easier. Again, the gods, in thinking to punish me, have left me no choice. This is what I do and what I must do. What good would it be for me to hope for something different? I am not encumbered by the hope of a different life. I live within my own certainty, in the silence of my own heart, in the crush of my own consciousness.
H: In what way is your consciousness crushed? Because I think that’s how I feel.
S: No, again you misunderstand me. I have realized that my own awareness consumes me. I try to pay attention to the rock and to the extraordinary effort it takes for me to move it. But, within seconds, my mind is engaged elsewhere. I suddenly remember an old friend, or I think about something I have seen, or I anticipate what I will do at a particularly hard part of my path. It could be anything, really. But I find that I’m no longer paying attention to the rock. I have removed myself from the pleasure of the present moment, and in doing this I become lost in a little drama that I have imagined for myself.
But there are moments when I am. . . .
H: When you are what?
S: This is difficult for me to explain exactly. If I say that I have moments when I am witnessing what’s happening without having my thoughts take me away, when I can simply appreciate a certain cast of light, a certain little gesture as I strain against the rock, the rock itself, whatever is around me, I feel something very momentary and yet, at the same time, something eternal. It seems to me that I experience the essence of being alive. It is, finally, indescribable. It is neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Certainly I make no claims for such witnessing. It is at one and the same time nothing special at all and the center of existence. I’m sorry, but explanation is quite useless. It is something one might experience in a painting or in a piece of music. In the end, damnation makes artists of us all.
H: I’m not sure what you mean.
S: When I say this, it might give you the impression that I have discovered something, an answer perhaps. And it is, in a sense, a discovery, though I might call it an un-covery. But it is no more a revelation than waking up in the morning. What is revealed is completely ordinary. Nevertheless, this is what I have come to appreciate.
H: So you have found a way to transcend your pain by dissociating from it?
S: It is the opposite. It is total submersion. You might call it learning to breathe underwater.
But such moments are very fleeting for me. Soon enough, the crush of consciousness is back. And I doubt that I could exist in such a moment for long. I imagine that I’d lose my need for language, for any kind of communication. If I were never outside such moments, I doubt that I would realize them at all. But about that, I’m unsure. I practice paying attention, but being in these moments is not, I fear, anything that can be learned. They seem to me quite uncontrollable and random, and I know they are fleeting. And as I hear myself talk about them, they feel uncomfortably like illusive answers, a play on words, which I know cannot really exist, except as something I have invented for myself.
H: It sounds as if, in those moments, you have come out from under your mind, that you have actually lost your mind, and I wonder if you also lose your feelings when you are enthralled in such moments?
S: The mind, of course, is bigger than we can fathom. To say that I lose my mind is not accurate. I suppose I lose some part of my mind, a part that tethers me to what I fear and what, in spite of myself, I still hope for. And in those few moments I’ve experienced, I am not enthralled. There is nothing at all consuming about such moments. I can only say that they simply are—they exist. And, no, I don’t lose my feelings. In fact, the whole experience is a feeling—far more than it’s a concept, even though I’m trying to describe it as if it were a concept.
It seems to me, in fact, that it’s pure feeling. I have found myself unexpectedly weeping during such experiences. They are neither tears of joy nor sadness. I might say that they are both, but I have no sense of being joyful or sad. But still I find myself weeping, so obviously I am moved, as we say. It occurs to me that they might be tears of resignation, and therefore tears of relief. Maybe they are tears of regret for all the truly bad things I did before I came to the underworld. But honestly, I am not aware of feeling relieved of anything. And I can’t say that I know what I have become resigned to.
I can only speculate that we find ourselves fighting so much of the time, straining to maintain some desired sense of balance. We spend time protecting ourselves and hoping for what we don’t have. We deflect most experiences. We identify a small world of things we care about and live for their sake. When we have them, we are fulfilled and seem to be comfortable, but, when we don’t, we struggle to get back to what is comfortable.
H: But this sounds very similar to what you just described. The way you generally feel crushed by your consciousness seems unsatisfactory to you, but when you can escape this crush, you weep because you’re finally comfortable?
S: Yes, that does almost sound logical. But I’ll tell you that it doesn’t feel like escape to me. In fact, it seems the opposite—the ultimate in awareness, totally submerged. So now you’ve given me more to think about. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve lied to myself. And I’m wondering if anything I’ve said has made you feel better about—what did you call it? The repetitiveness of your days?
H: I guess I expected you to be angrier about everything. I imagined you as the ultimate rebel, that your rebelliousness was the thing that kept you going and made sense of your life. Can our lives really make sense if we have nothing to fight back against?
S: That my punishment is endless and unjust has given me an important kind of choice. Though I can’t refuse this repetitive work—I can’t die—I can respond however I choose. The obvious response is anger. What can make me angry is when my foothold is unsecure and I slip; the rock scrapes awkwardly across my shoulder, and I’m injured. I am angry at such lapses and the pain they cause. But mine is a painful labor. I’ve noticed that my anger is a very physical thing. I experience it as tightening muscles and short breaths. My anger contracts me. And while I remain angry, I remain in this contraction. And I can keep myself contracted for a long time. On the other hand, I’ve learned that simply relaxing when I feel angry not only reduces my anger but makes it disappear. I wonder now if anger isn’t mostly such a contraction. If my foot slips or the rock shifts painfully across my neck and shoulder, I’ve learned to except it, as unpleasant as it is. Again, it’s as if I can witness the event without contracting into anger. So I myself have wondered, am I still angry? Probably the contraction has taken place internally where I can’t feel it. But I’m quite sure that I’m not trying to fake this relaxation—it’s not a denial of anger. It’s just a choice. Does it sound ridiculous to you that anger should be a choice?
H: Actually, it does. And it seems unnatural and unhealthy. I always think of anger as being involuntary. It’s something that happens to me, almost in spite of me, until it passes. And sometimes it doesn’t pass for quite a while. So you feel crushed by your consciousness most of the time, except when you have moments when you can escape it, and you deny being angry. Hmm. My friend, a shrink would say you have issues you’re not dealing with, that you seem pretty repressed. I’ve been told that it’s healthy to experience a full range of emotions and to accept them all.
S: Of course. But I would say, what’s the point? If anger is unproductive and in fact makes things worse, why would I choose to be angry? Why wouldn’t I choose action? And I imagine I might regret actions that come out of anger.
H: Well, that’s just the point, you can’t choose. Anger happens. You just have to deal with it, right?
S: I don’t think so. I’ve found that I can more and more easily control my anger. In fact, I hardly ever feel very angry for very long at all.
H: I don’t mean to disrespect you, but that seems nuts. Don’t you need to experience anger if you ever expect to experience joy? Actually, I guess you’re not the right person to ask about joy, right? Sorry about that…
S: Right. Right. You should ask the beautiful young woman who angered the gods and was condemned to having endless orgasms. What was her name? Because someone like me, pushing a rock up a mountain forever only to have it roll down just as I reach the top would know nothing about joy. Is that it?
H: I didn’t mean any disrespect, but, yeah, when I think of you I don’t automatically think about joy. Maybe I’m clueless, but it seems like a pretty safe assumption. And it does seem to me, excuse me for saying so, but it seems that you’re fairly delusional. You feel crushed by your thoughts, so you long for special moments when you don’t have any, but you’re not trying to transcend or escape anything, but you won’t allow yourself to get angry and you go around blissful all the time. Where’s your dark side, man? Don’t we all need our dark side? Balance?
S: Consider for a moment that I dwell in the underworld. Also, I can never die. For me there is literally no escape. Is that dark enough for you?
H: Well, sort of. But underworld or not, eternal life or whatever, you still need to get mad and hate the gods for doing this to you. I know I feel pretty angry a lot of the time, angry and fairly deeply depressed.
S: Actually, I think it’s your mortality that’s got you upset, not just that your life seems meaningless or repetitive. You desire ten thousand things, but, above all, you desire to escape from death.
H: Well how can anything really be meaningful if I’m going to die? Whatever I do, it won’t make any difference. And if I dedicate myself to some cause and they name buildings after me when I’m gone, what difference does that make to me? I’ll be dead. It really doesn’t give me much satisfaction to think that I’ll be remembered for something after I die. That’s fine for those who remember me, but it sucks for me. I think life is more absurd for those of us who have to die than it is for you—you get to keep pushing the rock up the mountain. You have no real schedule. Nobody cares if the rock is late. As long as you keep trying, it’s all good. Really when I think about it, I figure you’ve got almost nothing to complain about at all. Okay, you’re in the underworld. But it’s not like you’re strapped to a rock getting your liver pecked at by giant birds. And nobody turned you into a flower or a pig. You just have a crappy job. So what? You get eternal life as a bonus. You should be interviewing me, asking me how I feel.
S: You should speak to Orpheus; he knows about loss. But for him, the answer is always “be an artist.” It is, by the way, pretty good advice. Not that you need to paint or make music as he does. But you need to live a large part of your life in that state of mind—the artist’s state of mind. The best artists don’t think overly much, I suspect. Not to say that they’re dumb. In fact, they’re often obsessed with thinking about their art. But when they create, they need to let go of that thinking. The Muses are repelled by too much thinking. Your poet, Stevens, wrote that death is the mother of beauty.
H: So this is all you have to tell me?
S: I grant very few interviews. Ultimately, my interviewers want answers. And they want answers not about my life, which finally interests them very little, but about their own lives. This is why they come to me.
H: So, let me ask you. Will I have some existence, as myself, in the underworld after I die?
S: We are all shadows, and these words, as I’ve said, are just more shadows.
H: So that’s pretty evasive. Are you saying you can’t answer my question or you won’t?
S: I don’t know about anyone’s existence after death. If I had to guess, I’d say no; after death there is nothing for you. You are done. The world goes on. It changes. You will, no doubt, be remembered for a little while by a few. But, beyond that, the slate is wiped clean.
H: So it will be as though I never existed at all.
S: You have come to the question that, if any question can, can make sense of your life. My advice to you: study this question for a long time. Imagine, always, that the answer is no. I’m not sure what possible difference this or some other answer would make.
H: Are you kidding me? If I know that I go on after life, or that I’m reborn, this would be completely comforting to me.
S: Finding this comfort has been an institution for humans forever. But, sadly, I’m afraid this life is all you can be sure of. And maybe this is why I cry.
H: But you’re already dead.
S: If this is true, then delving into others’ lives is finally a matter of interviewing yourself. My friend, you, like all the others, have come to me for answers. I can tell you that life is significant and that it’s all you have. I do regret how I used it. I was, as they say, avaricious and deceitful. I killed to maintain my dominant position. I was famed as the craftiest of men. I seduced my niece. I stole my own brother's throne and betrayed Zeus’s secrets. These frantic actions were all born from my fear. But they were fruitless. I did die. I asked my wife to throw my dead body into the public square instead of giving me a proper burial. And she was so dedicated to me that she did as I asked.
H: But then you woke up in the underworld?
S: I awoke in your mind, in a place you have created for me.
H: Okay, now you’re playing with words. I’m no god. How could I have created the underworld?
S: Like any of the big ideas, it takes many people to sustain. It is part of the institution of comfort we have built for ourselves as a virtual world we can live in most of the time while we’re alive to escape the discomfort that you yourself have just revealed.
H: Now I know you’re delusional.
S: In fact, it’s like a beautiful mansion, a Sistine Chapel. A whole occupation of chapels plunked down in the heart of every town.
H: I think now you’re talking about our beliefs, about religion, right?
S: I am talking about your imagination.
H: I happen to have a very healthy imagination.
S: I could tell you that the door is always open, but I’m not sure you’d know what I meant.
And, as you can see, we have come down to the bottom of the mountain. I have no choice now but to begin again. As delusional as you imagine that I am, I am the one who has accepted this commission.
H: But you have no choice. You admitted that.
S: In this, I have no choice. But I do have many choices. And in this, I am the same as you.
H: I appreciate your meeting with me, but, honestly, I feel like saying thanks for nothing.
S: It was good to meet you. I wish you good luck. Maybe you’ll take the nothing that I’ve offered you, as Camus did, and examine it carefully. Finally, we’re all dreamers while we’re alive. It’s unavoidable. My simple advice to you: learn to breath underwater; also be an artist in how you live. Farewell.