Absurdity, honey
(6 min read)
A man in front of me at the bodega today was talking on the phone loudly in the attention seeking way that people who know they’re full of shit sometimes do. “Trump will be president in a few days,” he said, “and taxes will be going down, and the price of gas will go down, and so will the price of gold.”
A few minutes earlier at the laundromat, a news report about the Supreme Court upholding the TikTok ban ran for the second time as I pulled a sweater out of my wet clothes to take home and dry. I passed a woman in a strange hat talking to herself as I carried my wet sweater to grab a sandwich.
Alongside the attention seeking moron, workers and neighbors came into the bodega with a kind of strange cinematic choreography. “This feels almost Lynchian,” I thought. But I think I just wanted it to, to feel like maybe some dark neighborhood secret would be overheard, or that I’d see a mysterious being in the kombucha aisle, or the lighting would shift beautifully onto one of the workers as the fog of a mysterious past seeped in.
The world is absurd. This city is absurd. When I first learned about absurdism as an artistic movement, I was drawn to it. A response to the terrors of World War II where existentialism and dread could run around and laugh and laugh. A key tenant in absurdist theater–aside from ideas of proliferation and absence, grappling with unknowns and the unknowable–is humor. It’s funny. As chairs pile up or the person never arrives, we are laughing. And the laughter becomes uncomfortable and the discomfort makes us think and then we get scared until it comes back around to being funny again. Absurdity feels authentic to what it means to experience being alive.
I have been thinking a lot about David Lynch and his work. There are no direct quotes that stick with me, but more the way seeing his work has made me feel. The surreal and haunting images that have shaped what I knew was possible, the stories that make no sense and too much sense. To be remembered for ideas and images and unanswered questions is truly profound, I think.
To be able to laugh and find humor in the face of the terrifying and terrible reality that is existence is such a gift. I imagine what the world would be if we were all more curious and welcoming to the unknowable. I especially wonder what it would be like if more artists were as fearless when it came to “following the ideas” and letting them take shape. We need more of that and less attempts towards market value.
I have been thinking a lot about being forgotten lately, or really what it means to be forgotten. An older artist connected to my day job recently told me that “a lot of people drop off… sometimes you realize it and sometimes you don’t.” Longevity is not always something we think about, and the mere idea of it feels futile. But I think following the ideas is the way to go, even if the ideas go places not fully knowable by more traditional standards. I’d like to hope that if we trust in the ideas and we make them manifest, something of us–of them–will linger.
It feels like something unprecedented in our world is happening–some of it good and a lot of it murky and dark. Change and changes, collapses and catastrophes, new technologies and fears of old ones, the rise of old abuses rearing their heads again with more sophisticated tools.
Social media has made billionaires and it’s also connected us to ways to see the truth. It’s helped spread propaganda and allowed us to help people experiencing climate emergencies and genocide. I got a DM from a friend in Gaza, someone I have only interacted with online. “You are my family, and you supported me when so many would not.” Meanwhile trans people are vilified with no recourse and lies are spread and Apartheid Clyde is getting office space in the White House complex.
Absurd is maybe not the right word to encapsulate it all, but it covers some of it. A wealthy actress recently howled that “art will save us!” It will not. But art can open doors and shape how we think about the world and what is possible. It can help us confront the absurd and escape when we need to–and connect with the other weirdos who need to carry on when we’re gone. At least I hope so.
A few things of note:
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