Arbitrary Lines, Rigid Constraints: Black Lives Matter, COVID and the Absurd Walls

The height of poignancy in literature is reached when Albert Camus poses his mission: to answer the philosophical question of suicide, whether life is worth living. For Camus (and myself, though my own fear of exploration inhibits the jump into cold water required to fully comprehend this question), this problem is not illuminated by the darkness of his existence. Rather, it is a search for optimism in the face of dreary days. 

It is a question in which the answer does not find itself readily apparent. My own affirmation of this question that, indeed, life is worth living, is both consummated and betrayed by the events of the past four months. An answer seems lucid one day, only to find itself undercut the next. As protestors have taken the streets in hopes of ascertaining that, indeed, Black life does matter, Camus’ mission finds steps towards completion. “Our existence finds meaning in advocating for a better, more just world,” one might say. So be it. 

But enmeshed in that is precisely the paradox we are forced to grapple with: that simply by the nature in which one is born -their race, their socioeconomic status, their sexuality-one must fight and sacrifice life and limb to be seen, to be heard, to be treated equally. To breathe. The confines of one’s existence in society is assuredly arbitrary; race, for instance, should not influence one’s access to opportunity. Yet, those arbitrary lines ironically serve as rigid constraints. Black Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate of White Americans, are more than twice as likely to get evicted from their apartments, and have less access to adequate healthcare than their White counterparts (and Black women in particular are less likely to receive appropriate medical attention). As an acquaintance recently put it to me: “How many more Black people have to die for nothing to change?” His undergirding exacerbation: is life worth living if the meaning we construct is a futile endeavor? 

The existentialist-Camus perhaps cited most frequently- confidently proclaims the world is absurd; that our existence is highly capricious, contingent on large and small fortunes alike and that there is no rhyme or reason to why things are the way they are. It is the chasm between the desire to impart meaning on one’s life and the cold, detached world that does not allow that comfort. It is absurd because a child born into concentrated poverty will likely never have an opportunity to escape it no matter how hard he works. It is absurd because the passion one may exude towards a project -or a person- may be nullified by the cultural and political constraints of the society. It is absurd because, as Ivan contends in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, children must suffer for the sins of their fathers. This is all agreeable.

Left in our reflection is Camus’ question: why should we persist? Why continue to live in spite of the dreariness and degradation? What Camus overlooks is that the remedy we have put forward to soothe this chasm is often rerouted into two directions: hedonism and nihilism. The former is buttressed by the youthful exuberance that floats in the air when the formerly desolate beaches are transformed into an ideological battleground; the masses crowd onto the sand, screaming “to hell with your rules!,” throwing caution and health into the wind to maximize today’s ability to exercise freedom to the fullest. The gratification is, ultimately, small, but in the face of the prospects of quarantine, simultaneously significant. The latter, nihilism, seems to emerge as a product of knowing that despite all of the instant pleasure-seeking moments we search for, we still cannot make sense of the absurdity. 

“I wonder,” he says as he leaves the party, “if these relationships are vapid excursions that will never transcend beyond feelings of immediate gratification but produce perpetual longing.” 

“I fear,” she says, “that I cannot jump into the unknown and take the risk necessary that could give my life meaning.”

“I reckon,” one says, “that I am unable to renounce all that I have been taught about the world in order to create a new one for me.”

---

I imagine in this moment a young James Baldwin sitting in the cafes of Paris. Two months prior, Baldwin, the son of a Harlem minister, was at a crossroads: do I give up the world, or do I give up myself? To give up the world would be to capitulate, to agree to loss of agency and to answer Camus’ fundamental question in the negative. To give up the self would be to redefine himself in the midst of abject poverty, homophobic cultural practices and a preordained expectation that he was to preach at the pulpit his whole life. Baldwin chose the latter, plunging into a leap of faith that he would emerge from the intellectual scene of Parisian cafes an unparalleled storyteller. 

As he is at this cafe, I imagine that he longs to return to Harlem; that he is pessimistic in his craft; that he is ready to renounce himself as a conscious, autonomous individual and instead fulfill a role in society. He cannot take being treated as a subsidiary human, he cannot take food that is not homegrown, he can no longer feign a language that he will never claim. In other words, he is on the verge of philosophical suicide; he is ready to stop questioning his life and rest easy into facades of certainty. And as he smokes his third cigarette in a half-hour time span, exhausted from the tedious journey thus far, Richard Wright, acclaimed for writing Native Son, passes through. Baldwin’s whole existence is meant for this moment. Wright turns to him and smiles, as if to acknowledge that Baldwin will one day usurp him. And Baldwin smiles back, watching every idiosyncrasy of Wright’s: his gait, his cufflinks, his fingers twitching. He says to himself: “I am recovered.”

To this end, I find this contemporary moment thrusting us to be Baldwin. In spite of the dread that he faces, Baldwin escapes it through a committed intensity. This intensity required to analyze the ordinary smile, to walk the Parisian streets on a rainy day, to romantically pursue someone whose existence in his life has a timestamp, to write his magnum opus -- this has become his raison d'etre. Life has no significance other than if he carries himself with intensity in each conscious moment; to do otherwise would be to live a futile existence better suited for machinery than the reflective being.

Thus does it seem particularly instructive to redefine Baldwin’s “immutable law”: apathy, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the one who was apathetic. To live in the areas of “sure,” and “I guess,” and of “I should” is to betray oneself. Life does not need meaning in as much as it requires intensity and in it we find life’s greatest challenge. The sacrifice of life is, in many respects, the easiest of all sacrifices; yet to sacrifice youth for a passion or cause is beyond comprehensible.

I look no further than my own dialectical process to assert this. To lounge in the physical comfort of my home in DC while being isolated during quarantine has illuminated the basest need of humanity: to feel like one’s existence leaves an imprint on those around them. But no one has ever impressed their being upon the world through detachment, through inertia, through passivity. The protests throughout this nation in response to the murder of George Floyd proved that. No, what it requires is a concentration, an intensity that for all intents and purposes, should not emanate. After all, how many more Black people have to die for nothing to change? But a world of absurdity must be fought against by absurd people; by people who persist in the face of bleakness and say, “I can - no I must - be the master of my day.” That one recognizes the limitations of the world (and the limitations others put on one) and not only refuses to be defined by those limitations, but actively seeks to defy them. Life is a war of attrition: it is, in its most pessimistic days, Hobbesian and, in its most optimistic, peaks of felicity amidst banality. But to persist is to win. To persist with intensity is to conquer. There is no fate that cannot be overcome by defiance. After all, is this not the source of Baldwin’s ecstasy? 

---

“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only face we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death - ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.”

-James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“I knew my failures and regretted them. Yet I continued to forget them with a rather meritorious obstinacy.”

-Albert Camus, The Fall