no explanation

can't sleep. thinking about how fucked up things are at the moment. that's what happens when i spend a good portion of my day reading about the conflict going on in the Gaza Strip.

i had an urge to read my xmas present - David Carroll's Albert Camus the Algerian: Terrorism, Colonialism, Justice - but opted for something slightly removed from such themes so that i might at some point sleep. I pick up The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus.

yesterday i saw i've loved you so long at the cinema. it was quite amazing, though i agree with the linked review that it stumbled towards the end. but i can overlook this for what it gave me, which includes some nice insight into my own issues of late. Claudel seems to draw from the works of Dostoyevsky (this is made explicit) and Camus through his exploration of the isolated hero, the stranger. Juliette is isolated, but so are other characters, and so are viewers, like me, shedding tears for what is not said or known. i cried at this woman's silence, not needing to know why. i cried for me. i extracted many symbols of, and references to, isolation, imprisonment, and being stuck. the film suggests to me that such things might be self-imposed. the knots can be our own doing.

as with Crime and Punishment, the reader is detached from the protagonist, as are the surrounding characters. and motives are (for the most part) unclear. there's a beautiful line in there about the futility of giving explanation for one's actions. it seems to be suggested here that explanations are not only unnecessary but impossible. can we really explain why we do what we do? whether these involve crimes, self-punishments, or tears? surely once the moment has passed, it is gone, and no clear and true explanation can be found in the past.

the same might be said of wars. we tend to speak of and analyse them as relics of the past. but through explanation we can never get to the now - to a current spilling of blood still warm. we contemplate bloodshed in past tense. afterthought and explanation. and so it seems likely to happen again.

so i pick up my copy of The Myth of Sisyphus and backtrack a few pages to recall the thread of where i'm up to. i discover the following words underlined:

For the absurd man it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.

i can contemplate yesterday's tears, but i can't explain them. my contemplations are muddied with afterthought, and with all the ideas and conversations and texts i've since grappled with. and so i end up here, blogging. patching together the yesterday of today, the today of many hours ago, the now which is already past.