Stranger Anxiety

It was interesting to me that on the day I posted about “red flags” and Andy added in details about my older son’s feelings of frustration and destructive anger at preschool, he was preparing for an exam on Albert Camus’ The Stranger.

We got to talking about the book, and about what it might say about humanity.  As I leafed through my kid’s copy of the book, notes scribbled in the margins, this beloved text was a stranger to me.  I remembered good old Meursault (a great anti-hero and a great wine, partly due to flint and partly due to existentialism) but memory is selective and I hardly remembered that the book begins with the death of his mother.

I remembered Meursault killing the Arab “for no reason,” but my son reminded me about the context of the murder—I did remember the surreal sense of sun and sand and ennui and nihilism… I vividly remembered Meursault heading to the gallows at the end hoping only for “howls of execration,” but the new translation had him hoping for “cries of hate.”

And yet, this character who spoke so deeply to me back in the dark despair of high school spoke deeply to my son all these years later.  We joked that he could end his essay by saying that he only hoped that his teacher would write comments of hate on it.

The thing about the existentialists, however, that has slowly dawned on me over years of life is that Sartre and Camus wrote as acts of love.  They said that life had no meaning, but as a high schooler with a case of Deutsche Angst that gave license for licentiousness and whatever depravity I could muster; as a psychologist and a blogger I see that while life may be a random Rorschach, we are free to create our own myths (provided we gain the consciousness to realize that we can, and do, create our own myths).

Camus may write about meaningless murder in a meaningless world, but he holds the mirror up in order to help us not just perpetuate the status quo—whether that is in health co-called “care,” education or never-ending economic expansion.

I found myself chatting with my kid and bonding over existentialism—connecting with my own alienated teenager across the transom of a book that for me was a wormhole in the cosmos leading out of boring suburban Chicago in into the hard-living garrets of artists everywhere.

I don’t much care what kind of grades my kids get so long as they make a sincere effort and actually learn something.  Talking about The Stranger made me clearer than ever that culture has lead to nothing but violence, materialism and modern alienation—that whatever my kid would write on his essay, it would certainly not be about an honest political, social or spiritual discourse but rather a pro-forma step on a ritual to get into college and become part of the very system that kills that Arab in that book, and which kills so many people around the world as we write and read these words—kills with bullets overseas and in the hood, and kills with lives of quiet desperation on the home-front.

Camus challenges us to make our own meaning by taking away the spoon-fed easy meaning provided by the Church or the State.  The meaning I choose to make is that consciousness is spontaneously advancing, and that culture is becoming flat rather than hierarchical.  The revolution that I see, at least in my self-created myth, is non-violent; it leaves the system to crumble and rebuilds itself organically along the lines of horizontal relationships, connections and mirroring recognitions of each other as opposed to power, soaring buildings and ridiculous lists of the richest and prettiest people.

The group is the richest; the relationships between us all far exceed any capacity of even the best and brightest of us.  We do not need more charismatic leaders, we need to consider the very real possibility that we’re all valid, all have a say and that we all love and are loved (perhaps this becomes true for us just as soon as we make this our myth—consciousness blooming spontaneously all around our awakening world).  Change may mean the death of the world that we’ve known, or more precisely the death of the myth that science will save us and that God will be found in a piece of paper with a picture of a pyramid with an eye staring back out at us.

I’m not trying to create a new myth for others to buy into, but rather encouraging us to collectively accept that all of our perspectives, all of our myths, taken in aggregate, is the new myth.  This is a perspective that widens consciousness to hold opposites, healing the Western Christian split or duality of good and evil, and uniting it with the time, space, fear and desire-transcending consciousness of the East.  This brings us to life in the present time and world, and allows us to work together to be of service… to each other.

So, let’s dedicate today to dusting off the black turtleneck of the mind and re-engaging in honest and passionate discourse about what time it really is here on planet earth—re-making our myth in the service of all our collective children.

Namaste, Bruce

Tags: literature and parenting