We find it difficult to believe that someone else can think with the same intensity, know trauma or happiness, melancholy or ardency identical to what we feel. It can seem incomprehensible that thoughts can flicker and flare inside of others like they kindle and burn inside of you. You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read1. It doesn’t seem possible that the same thought, the same feeling, the same words can have been expressed, felt or spoken by another. But then an artist will show you a sugar cube soaking slowly in coffee and infer that it is the world around that cube that is dissolving, and you realise that we are interconnected more than we will ever be able to make sense of.2 It can be both an unbearable sadness and a great consolation to know that your thoughts are not in fact isolated (from the Latin insulatus – ‘made into an island’). Such a realisation can make the heart feel like a thing not abstract, but something instead possessing a weight and a mass within one’s chest. That heaviness and form is borne of the wonder of someone explaining part of your very own nature to you. This lucidity is often prompted by the strangest of things, appearing without our bidding: moments of absurdity. Camus referred to this torture as, ‘the incalculable tumble before what we are’ suggesting we might experience it when watching someone through the glass of a kiosk speaking into a telephone and marvel at the ridiculousness of a few dozen ‘mechanical gestures’ and question why and how he could possibly be alive.3 This same absurdity can visit once in a hundred repeats of a familiar act, such as the horizontal slide of a metal catch between a door and its frame. We can precipitate emotion when we straighten a towel on its rail. Something perforates and overwhelms whilst watching a bangle slide and sway on the wrist of your wife as it rests on the steering wheel of the car. One morning you are momentarily incapable of deciding whether to scrape the burnt toast or not. You freeze as you find the card you once gave to your daughter – a cartoon depicting an elephant inflating a heart-shaped balloon with its trunk – and mentally grasp at a thing that is neither the card nor your daughter, but something not quite tangible that exists at a midway point between them both. These ‘truths’ are a sense we have about ourselves which form irrefutable sensation or fact in a flash, but are then gone just as instantly. We become paralysed in these few seconds of abstraction, indecision and reverie, in moments where the torture and wonder of something more profound threatens and promises to appear. For just a few seconds we become anchored in a world that is weightless and get close to understanding something of who we are and the utterly absurd lives that we live. But rarely for more than a few seconds. And seldom could we endure that intensity for longer.
‘Friday Fragment’* is an additional weekly instalment to my A Thousand Fragments monthly newsletter. *Sorry for the delay to this week’s post.
James Baldwin
There are few who have held up a mirror more powerfully than Kieślowski.
The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus
well, again ... I really loved that. I love how it slows me down for a moment or two to read the exact words written and feeling the edges of that thought or sentence with the tip of my finger, like tracing the outline of the drawing of a leaf and trying to remember its shape with closed eyes.
I love that Camus quote and what it gets you thinking about