5:30am. The alarm goes off. For a brief moment, everything is quiet and still. The day is blank, a fresh white sheet of paper waiting for the first mark. And then it happens.
A series of neurons fire and memory awakens, consciousness kicks into gear and the awareness that this day is a monday sets in. The sheet of paper is no longer blank, but is covered with the ghosts of the events of every other monday like this one. Events are scribbled all over that page in pencil during the day and erased with a rubber eraser each night. The indentations and faint grey marks mar the page, and already the day has started along it's course like a train along the track.
6:00am. The alarm goes off. Phil the weatherman wakes up in Punxsutawney. Then he realizes that it is groundhog day. Again. Despair sets in.
At some unidentifiable moment in eternity, Sysiphus heaves his rock to the top of the mountain. For one brief moment it rests there at the peak, and Sysiphus takes in the view. A cool breeze blows against his sweaty brow. The rock shifts very slightly in the breeze, a bit of gravel gives way beneath the great weight, and with a groan the rock starts rolling. Slowly at first, then inevitably gravity takes hold and the rock charges down the hill. The caustic dust is thrown into Sysiphus' face and sticks to his sweaty brow. He turns and follows his rock to the bottom of the hill.
At this turning, this fulcrum on which the rhythms of life pivot, what choices are open to your average human not granted with immortality? The first choice is that of compliance - Go or Do Not Go. Continue building up this structure by placing one more brick on top of the stack, continue carving this groove by running the blade along one more time. Or burn it all down, fill in the groove with cement, run away and join the circus.
For Phil the weatherman and Sysiphus, the Do Not Go choice is not an option. Immortality has taken away the option of self-destruction as a means of escape. Bath with a toaster? Go ahead. You'll still wake up at 6am in the same bed to the same music with the same maddening groundhog in your head the next day. Sysiphus tried to trick the gods into letting him back into the world of the living, and he got a few years of sunshine and seaside before they set him the punishment of pushing his rock up a hill for eternity. Escape is not an option. So you must go.
And so you go, you sit on the train at the appointed time, you see the same people in the same carraige going along the same track. Like mirroring reflections, the dizzying infinite stretches out before you. The nausea rises.
Albert Camus proposed that Sysiphus was happy at his task, that in the conscious moment of turning down the hill he was aware of the absurdity of his plight. "The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn." By scorning the gods who punished him Sisyphus turns that rock on its pivot.
Ah, scorn! safety net of trapped lemmings everywhere. intoxicating balm of contempt and derision, which smoothes over personal tortures by allowing you to take pleasure in pointing sticks at your perceived torturers. Perhaps that worked to fuel Sysiphus's fire, whipping up the flames of scorn to increase the force with which he heaved that rock. But for the rest of us down here on earth, scorn tends to fuel the fire with the same force as throwing a couple of sticks of dynamite into your car's fuel tank.
The pencil of behaviour, experience and consciousness continues drawing on the page, drawing the hand that holds the pencil itself. Sometimes the hand holding the pencil drifts away from the hard line of habit and embellishes around the corners. The hard line becomes soft with sketches of vineyards and verdant forests, ripe fruit hanging from the branches and elves winking beneath mushrooms.
Every day the drawing begins anew. While some lines will inevitably be re-drawn in the shadow of yesterday's, new embellishments are always possible. And sometimes, every now and then, yesterday's embellishment becomes today's hard line. Let us remember the time when drawing was fresh and new. Let us not be afraid to draw new flowers and castles and cities in the clouds around the hard lines of yesterday.
