Something absurd is going on.

If you are feeling spent (of course you are), it is because you are being pummeled by the absurd. French philosopher Albert Camus instructs us that the absurd is what is flung back when we throw plans at an indifferent universe.

COVID was absurd. Brexit was absurd. Polarized countries are absurd. The complete and utter destruction of our environment is absurd. Anything that disrupts our notion of what is is absurd.

We change our notion of what is to minimize – normalize – the absurd. And then we make more plans.   There is a chilling example of this exact thing in Ernest Hemingway’s memoirs. He wrote about sitting in a café, feeling empty and lost (i.e. conscious of the absurd and the futility of life) and then he has a drink, has a bite to eat and “lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”  
Camus would have shaken his head reproachfully.

In Franz Kafka’s most famous novel, Metamorphosis, the hero, Gregor, wakes up as a beetle; rather than dispensing with the why or how, Kafka moves on with the plot.

Similarly, one of my favorite prose/poems, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, is the tale of a crow that moves in with a family after the mother dies. Says the crow: “He didn’t see me against the blackness of his trauma.”

In grief, the senses fold, don’t they? Even a giant crow in the entryway could seem normal. Our mental, physical, and even spiritual health demands we normalize the absurd. Demands that we keep living.

In one of her first writings, essayist and social critic Joan Didion, writer of unthinkable loss and the abstraction of grief, observes the absurdity when society shifts so fundamentally on one aspect of life.

In this case, marriage à Las Vegas.

To be married in Las Vegas, Clark County, Nevada, a bride must swear that she is eighteen or has parental permission and a bridegroom that he is twenty-one or has parental permission. Someone must put up five dollars for the license. (Sundays and holidays, fifteen dollars.) […] Nothing else is required.
From Joan Didion’s Slouching TOWARD Bethlehem

This was in 1967. Didion highlights the absurdity that the rest of one’s life is decided on impulse. And yet, it works because Vegas markets the feeling of eternity.

Las Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification […] Almost everyone notes there is no “time” in Las Vegas, no night and no day and no past and no future; neither is there any logical sense of where one is.
From Joan Didion’s Slouching TOWARD Bethlehem

Vegas upset notions of marriage by promising eternity, helping us avoid our death anxiety. Marriage is a physical thing; it needs to be shaken up.

But what about a more destructive absurd? Do we normalize that, too?

Consider the horrifyingly true story of Elie Wiesel’s imprisonment in Auschwitz. When Wiesel witnesses his father being brutalized, Wiesel does not act. “I would have dug my nails into this criminal’s flesh only yesterday. Had I changed that much? So fast?”

Later, when his father dies, Wiesel feels even less:

I woke up at dawn on January 29. On my father’s cot, there lay another sick person. They must have taken him away before daybreak and taken him to the crematorium. Perhaps he was still breathing…

No prayers were said over his tomb. No candle lit in his memory. His last word had been my name. He had called out to me, and I had not answered.

I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears. And deep inside of me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like Free at last!
From Elie Wiesel’s Night

The abject dehumanization of the Auschwitz experience acted as an instant normalizer against additional stress. Wiesel normalized his father’s (absurd) suffering to keep himself alive. Wiesel’s experience lends insight into how society might normalize the virulent absurd.

During the First World War, a modern poet of tremendous urgency, Wilfred Owen, wrote war poems of enormous human consciousness: collective consciousness—do we as a society know what it means to wage war? And individual consciousness—do we know what it means to march toward death?

Owen’s poem “Conscious” is ostensibly about a soldier dying, but it is about society’s consciousness that war is absurd.

But sudden evening blurs and fogs the air.
There seems to be no time to want a drink of water.
Nurse looks so far away. And here and there
Music and roses burst through crimson slaughter.
He can’t remember where he saw the blue sky…
The trench is narrower.
Cold, he’s cold, yet hot –
And there’s no light to see the voices by…
There is no time to ask… he knows not what.
From Wilfred Owen’s poem “Conscious.”
Read the full poem here.

“A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it,” warned (promised?) Camus.

I am not as shocked by photos of overflowing, helpless COVID wards as a few years ago.

Are you?

It is not because I’ve become desensitized. It is not because COVID is weaker. It is because I kept making plans. I kept order. I kept my kids alive. We did not let death claim us.

Ah, death. Our unknowable actual mortality.

“Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty’s existence,” reasons poet Joseph Brodsky in his love letter to Venice, “is that we never know when we are to die.”

Camus would agree the most incredible absurdity of all is that we strive for control and meaning when we cannot control when our existence ends (or begins).

Camus argues that our death anxiety makes us find meaning and control and normalize the absurd in the first place. That quest turns into a mechanization of life.

Rising, tram, four hours in the office or factory, meal, tram, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, according to the same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time.

But one day, the ‘why’ arises, and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement […]. Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life. Still, at the same time, it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows. What follows is the gradual return into the chain, or it is the definitive awakening. At the end of awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or recovery. In itself, weariness has something sickening about it. Here, I must conclude that it is good. For everything begins with consciousness, and nothing is worth anything except through it.
From Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus

Camus tells us the mechanization of life must be fought. Normalization must be fought. (He suggested with humor). Or, to say it differently: Never stop being affected. Even if that means we allow pain and death into our hearts. It also provides power. Humor. And love.

But once you are conscious of the absurd, you are aware of the absurd.   French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil wrote cogently about our need to utilize suffering as a means of knowledge.   
“Human misery would be intolerable if it were not diluted in time. We have to prevent it from being diluted in order that it should be intolerable.”   
Although Weil did make the distinction between suffering that can enlighten and that which merely destroys the soul and the body and renders us a non-being. Read more in Weil’s illuminating personal thoughts Gravity and Grace Are you willing to take that chance?

Something absurd is going on.