First Tragedy, Then Farce
Of crises, stomach bugs and the Absurd
You know the quote: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce". It’s probably the second most famous thing Karl Marx ever wrote, after that stuff about workers of all nations uniting, etc. It comes from his essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis-Napoleon, and is probably the only joke the old fraud made that remains remotely funny. It’s also (full disclosure!) the title of my most recently-published novel, and although I’m happy to give that a gratuitous plug it’s not actually the reason I’m returning to it here. Not that it’s entirely irrelevant - one of its themes involves the human propensity to repeat behaviour that probably wasn’t a good idea in the first place with ever less productive results - but it’s not what I had in mind when I had the idea for this article.
No, my immediate prompt was three days spent recently with what I was told was a gastric virus, that is, a sudden, monstrous onslaught of diarrhoea, nausea and fatigue that rendered me incapable of anything during that time beyond clamping myself to the lavatory seat like Ahab lashed to the Pequod’s mast, interspersed with three- and four-hour periods sleeping the sleep of the dead.
I vaguely remember a wise man (the Buddha? Jung? Werner Erhard? Maybe all three) once saying that “Everything reminds us of everything else,” and this dictum recurred to me as I lay in between evacuation and unconsciousness, remembering previous episodes of crippling digestive illness, looking, in that unavoidable human fashion (is it really ‘unavoidable’, or is it just me?) for a pattern that linked them all together.
The first example was an episode nearly fifty years ago now, shortly after I’d first enrolled at university, when I found myself struck down on the shabby mattress of my student bedroom incapable of all but the most tentative and dangerous movement. I missed Freshers’ Week and, by the by, a legendary beginning-of-term Union gig by glam-yob favourites Slade that was invaded by skinheads and sacked in the manner of the Huns’ descent on Rome, the consequent repair bill ensuring there were no further live music ents for the rest of the year. Not that I cared. I lived on ice lollies for seven days, and would have starved of those if it hadn’t been for the saintly forebearance of a girlfriend who brought them every day and listened to my groaning. It was easy even then to infer a psychosomatic origin for my symptoms. Here I was, about to take a big step into the grown-up world of Higher Education and all that necessarily follows - heightened expectation of material achievement, heightened sense of inadequacy if it fails to materialise. I was, I reasonably concluded, actually shit-scared.
We English love to play with medical and pseudo-medical terms to explain our bodily discomforts. I’m sure had I bothered or been able to visit a doctor either in 1979 or last week I would have been given a satisfactorily scientific-sounding diagnostic reason for my gut’s rebellion - something like the ‘gastric virus’ I suggested above, perhaps? I could have repeated it to friends and anyone else in the vicinity and been greeted with a sympathetic nodding of heads and the tacit assurance that there’s a lot of it going around. But I confess to being drawn to the French colloquial manner of referring to any such sudden irruption of sickness into the humdrum business of bodily life as une crise - a crisis. The French have une crise de nerfs - a crisis of the nerves - and une crise de foie - a crisis of the liver (which carries the added, irresistible, pun on crise de foi - a crisis of faith…) Me, I think I have des crises d’estomac - crises of the stomach. You probably see where I’m going here.
My stomach crises are well established, or as well-established as revolutions can be (thanks again. Karl.) Thinking sideways from this most recent one and the ur-crisis of Freshers’ Week 1979 I recall several others, most notably that which hit me after I graduated and had just begun my first job in the City of London - the Place To Be in London in the 1980s - coincidentally less than a fortnight after my younger brother’s sudden death. No surprise really, and there have, I’m sure, been others I can’t call to mind immediately. Contemporary pseudo-psychological parlance talks about events being ‘triggering.’ Maybe so. But perhaps also reactions like my crises d’estomac - and my linking of them within a kind of connective taxonomy - are just a way I have of making some sort of sense of the vicissitudes of existence…
The most recent iteration of this pattern? Well, I’m now less than one month off the age when I’ll qualify for my state pension - the ‘Old Age Pension’ of traditional terminology. How did that happen? as I frequently ask myself. I’ve slipped unwarily into senescence. That’s bound to be a shock to the organism. Would that there were an explanation to mitigate that undeniable fact.
In his masterwork The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus analyses the strategies used by many serious, intelligent people to manage their underlying, grudging awareness that human life is essentially meaningless in the grand scheme of the Universe. Faith in religion, political engagement, love and sex, art - all take their turn at being debunked in the face of what Camus called The Absurd. Looking for meaningful patterns in the essential chaos of existence is at best wishful thinking, more usually simple delusion. The Universe makes no sense - at least, none that your average human can discern - and the rest is speculation. It’s an argument I’ve always found persuasive, although in practical terms it’s one that’s very difficult to incorporate into day-to-day life, where we assume and base our choices and other decisions on what we believe to be immutable truths. Most of these are based on patterns, long observed or taken for granted, observed and made canonical by prior generations or, as in the case of recurrent crises like my periodic bouts of stomach revolt, deduced from individual experience. But it ain’t necessarily so, and any evidence that my crises, or those of anybody else for that matter, are linked by some kind of meaningful theme, remains circumstantial.
For me, the world keeps turning and my guts seem to be behaving themselves. Until the next time. Camus’ central image in The Myth is that of the Greek mythological figure Sisyphus, condemned for impiety by the gods to roll a rock up a mountain for all eternity, in the knowledge that as soon as he gets to the summit the rock will fall down the other side and he’ll have to start all over again. That, says Albert, is the human condition in a symbolic nutshell, but in order to deal with its inexorable horror “We must try to imagine Sisyphus happy.” That seems a worthy and poetic notion, and one that’s just about imaginable of someone who’s just laboured up God-knows-how-long a steep trail pushing a boulder, stopping at the top to draw breath and look at the view, congratulate himself and mop his brow, before said boulder slips from his grasp and plunges God-knows-how-far back into a new abyss.
Unless he’s got the shits, that is. That might require some further explanation.