THE FALL --FIRST STAB

My initial response to the book by Albert Camus, "The Fall", reminds me of the joke that continually makes the rounds of the doctor's lounges:

Q. What do you call 1000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea?

A. A good start.

As my father and I discussed lately, we both discovered a long time ago that good intentions do not come from pure motives -- in fact pure motives probably do not exist on the level of our playing ground. I actually recall the very spot where this memorably occurred to me, which Was on Fullerton Avenue in Chicago, very close to its terminus at Lake Michigan, just north of the Lincoln Park Zoo. This was an area where it was a little dangerous to cross the street and there were many stoplights and I thought to myself, what about the business of helping little old ladies across the street? And I realized I would only do that to basically glorify myself; I had a vested interest in making myself look good, especially to myself. However, that charade seemed to end at that moment and I realized I was not really a nice guy, so to speak; only a rather calculating one. It was also in Chicago that I thought of the phrase, "black dragon" to describe all of the darkness with which I was increasingly having to deal. I was not having fun, yet!

I also realized that I was in the habit of using people and that I really had very little idea what unselfish love would look like. A few years later I came to a couple of conclusions. First, that I could not claim that I had never seen unselfish love. Second, that even if I had, I had no idea how to replicate it since my unconscious seemed to have no end of "garbage-to-go." In terms of the first thought, I had already experienced unconditional love from a woman, namely, from my grandmother. Other people may have other views of her but she was always there for me and accepted me and my scruffy band friends unannounced, day or night. This was one of those people whom I took for granted and took advantage of routinely. In terms of the second thought, I pretty much gave up on significant human relationships in general and specifically in regards to the opposite sex.

In retrospect, it would appear that I was suffering from what Kierkegaard called, "The Sickness Unto Death"; and to be frank, I find this darkness depressing to recall, even now. Camus was also one to try to be an honest man, which generally leads to a less than optimistic view of man. In this regard, reading the story makes one think of John Calvin and his attributing the apparent bottomless pit of the depravity of man to exactly that: The Fall. The only thing that causes their views to differ is that Camus was proceeding from a materialist basis and John Calvin could not make that assumption. Both Calvin and Kierkegaard proceeded from the assumption that materialism was too much of assumption to make. Of course materialism is not new; it continues to pop up in endless guises; it caused Flannery O'Connor to designate the South as "Christ-haunted" and to designate many Christians as practicing "practical atheism." Which is much more common than the actual religion of atheism.

However looking at the entire course of Camus' life, one could not come to the firm conclusion that he was an atheist or remained a materialist. One can certainly say that he was a rebel and a singularity. I'm not sure exactly what caused him to part ways with Jean Paul Sartre but there was for Camus certainly a different progression after that split and he became more of a critic of existentialism than a friend or prophet of it. One can only say that he seemed to come to a conclusion much more like that of Kierkegaard than that of Jean Paul Sartre; in spite of his activism or possibly because of it, i.e. the French resistance movement. Jean Paul Sartre went on to embrace communism probably as a reaction to fascism or possibly just as a gesture of the absurd. Camus however could not make the basic assumption required by communism, i.e. doctrinaire atheism. I do not know how long Jean Paul Sartre remained a communist but in an interview at the end of his life, he was asked what the point of it all was, and he replied, simply, "Hope!" This hope whoever apparently lacks any content or teleology, is a kind of a hope sort of suspended in midair; not with complete detachment (Nirvana theory) but no firm attachments either. I can only echo Walker Percy's comment about conservatism versus liberalism, "I no longer know what those words mean.." "hope" and "despair" being even more difficult to discern. Incidentally, much of "The Sickness Unto Death" was occupied with the definitions of the various kinds of despair and where they lead. All of them very necessary;and not just for the sake of argument.

There is evidence that Camus was looking for something a little bit more concrete as he progressed,
and had problems with generalizations, abstractions, and theorizing; yet he was also not satisfied by the usual categories of thinking presented by the philosophers up until his time. In one sense, he reminds me little bit of Bob Dylan, who managed to evade, as a good poet, "the usual shipping lanes" of intellectual thought. Again I come up with the word, "unsubsumable, "which Walker Percy would use to refer to the Jews as being outside of human categorization. The individual human being may be honest but is more likely to be dishonest; yet neither category can even come close to summing up an individual who is no longer a "sign," but who evades summaries and definitions almost entirely. Labels and box-ifying (toxifying?) come quite naturally to the masculine mind in particular. A bit later I would like to explore the rather severe limitations of writing out of a male brain structure; there are more designing men, in one sense,than designing women,who have a capacity to live more "wholisticaly" than most male writers can comprehend. I think it was exactly this that caused Mark Twain to spend so much time and effort and care on his book about Joan of Arc; it represented a profound mystery that he could not explain in materialistic/reductionistic terms.And


Thaaaats not all, folks