The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010) (21 page)

Nietzsche often walked for six to eight hours a day and had some of his best insights on these walks. And he was also obsessed by dancing: ‘I could believe only in a God who knew how to dance.’
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Nietzsche himself regretted that he was unable to boogie: ‘I know how to utter the parable of the highest things only in dance – and now my greatest parable has remained unspoken in my limbs.’
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And he described himself as the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus, the horned god of ecstasy and original Lord of the Dance, the presiding deity of early rituals and worshipped under a variety of names including Bacchus, Pan, Faunus, Osiris and Shiva. Dionysus (known in Ireland as Satan) even turned up near my hometown in the 1960
s
– in a dance hall, of course. An ordinary Saturday night in the Mecca was galvanized by the appearance of a strikingly handsome stranger, dressed all in black, who could jive with astoundingly languid ease. All the women yearned to be with him; of course, he chose the most lovely. This girl danced all night in ecstasy and agreed to go outside but, as they were leaving, glanced down and saw, just in the nick of time,
the cloven hoof
. There could be no mistaking the identity of the stranger. Though, when I heard the story I wondered how, if he was resourceful enough to look like Cary Grant, dress like Johnny Cash and move like Elvis, he could fail to have disguised that stupid hoof. In an earlier era, women would have gladly followed the god into the woods but, in 60
s
Ireland, they remained at home – and the Mecca was obliged to close down.

More than any other thinker, Nietzsche devoted himself to the pursuit of transcendence in all stages of intensity – zest, intoxication, joy and exaltation – and this is both his strength and his weakness. Nietzsche is the great aerator of life, the tonic in the G & T (Schopenhauer is the slice of lemon). Nietzsche effervesces, dances, leaps but, when the fizz dies away, there is nothing left. There is little to retain and use. Nietzsche’s main function may be as a non-pharmacological mood enhancer, a thinker more to be snorted than studied. He himself used books as illegal stimulants. The aim was not to learn but to get high and stay aloft. So his famous
Will to Power
, a book title chosen not by Nietzsche himself but posthumously by his editors, was really only a form of personal intoxication: ‘The first effect of happiness is the feeling of power.’
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Note the key phrase ‘
the feeling
of power’. I have come across this phrase nine times so far in his work – but I have yet to find him praising the
exercise
or
wielding
of power. Indeed, he had nothing but contempt for those who sought worldly supremacy: ‘They all strive towards the throne: it is a madness they have – as if happiness sat on a throne! Usually filth sits on the throne.’
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He despised those who had struggled to gain power over others and admired the saints and ascetics who had struggled to gain power
over themselves
. What he sought was a purely personal transcendence.

His mistake was to try to make a temporary condition permanent. He went mad, if not
from
then certainly
in
euphoria. Perhaps God, annoyed at being written off as dead, decided to show this so-called Ubermensch who had the livelier sense of humour and made the lifelong denouncer of pity embrace in tears a dying horse being whipped by a coachman in the street.

The other thing to remember is that Nietzsche was frequently
play-acting
, being outrageous merely in order to shock. And, from the Marquis de Sade to William Burroughs, the standard way to shock has been to extol cruelty. But no one genuinely cruel would make such a public profession. You do not have to pretend to be what you are. The Nazis, whom Nietzsche is accused of inspiring, never boasted of being cruel. Instead they boasted of being the benefactors of mankind. But the danger with playacting is that it is interpreted literally by the naive. Nietzsche himself foresaw this misunderstanding: ‘The high spirits of kindness may look like malice.’
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Nietzsche is like the Zen masters who jolted their disciples into attention with koans, combinations of paradox, illogicalness, surprise and shock – one of the most famous, attributed to Linji, is: ‘If you meet the Buddha kill him.’ Sometimes the jolt was not just mental, as in this koan of Toku-san’s, which I would love to use to bring instant enlightenment to my own students: ‘Thirty blows of my staff when you have something to say; thirty blows just the same when you have nothing to say.’
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Nietzsche is the only Western thinker to have the key Zen quality of zest – and this alone makes him worth reading: ‘Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one’s strength, to read a
book
- I call that vicious!’
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This ‘vicious’ at the end is so unexpected but perfect that it provokes the rare and wonderful thing – a laugh of sheer delight.

Another lower form of transcendence, zest is more an attitude than a state, so it can be cultivated. It requires first detachment and then the paradoxical engagement that detachment can facilitate, a combination of curiosity, attentiveness and analysis. Zest loves the world but refuses to take the world at its own valuation and finds this usually solemn and self-important valuation ridiculous. So zest is essentially subversive. It is a gleeful delight in the absurdity of the human condition and an ironic acknowledgement of the infinite comic genius of God.

The quintessentially zestful character is Puck in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
– an intermediary between his ridiculous squabbling fairy masters and the equally ridiculous squabbling humans, Puck is a mere functionary, an administrator with little power to initiate or control – and, as is frequently the fate of administrators, he is given incomplete knowledge and then blamed for inappropriate action. Yet he never complains. Indeed, an example to all resentful employees, he enjoys both his work and his unsocial hours, relishing the absurdity of humans (‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’
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) and absurdity in general (‘And those things do best please me that befall preposterously’
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).

Puck is a sophisticated and ironic Lord of Misrule, the character in medieval carnivals who mocks and satirizes the established order. And satire and mockery were often features of the early ecstatic rituals. Zest has long been a feature of transcendence and has always involved irreverent humour.

How to become blessed with zest? Seek it out – it is found most often in art forms that favour short bursts. This is why it is rare in philosophy (Nietzsche turned increasingly to aphorisms) and also rare in novels (though there is Terry Southern’s classic short novel,
The Magic Christian
, which has a perfect Lord of Misrule for the capitalist age in billionaire prankster Guy Grand).

Zest is most at home in poetry and jazz – and it is no coincidence that both are rhythm based. But the spontaneous directness and brevity of good poems and jazz solos make them seem easy. It looks and sounds as though anyone could do it. So anyone and everyone tries, with the result that 99 per cent of poetry and jazz is depressing crap. It takes time and energy to seek out the real thing.

Good jazz solos are especially hard to find. So I went to a legendary New York club more in a spirit of pilgrimage than in the hope of being inspired. And the club was indeed dispiriting – a dank, dark, shabby basement selling overpriced wine that tasted like antifreeze laced with gall. The musicians were heavy, disabused, middle-aged black men, required to invent and astonish twice nightly, with three shows at weekends. Who could? So they coasted along, desultorily supported by a white-haired drummer who had once played with several of the long-dead greats and was now obviously reconciled to going through the motions for a living. The audience, sparse and white, responded with as little enthusiasm, and the musicians acknowledged the thin applause with weary nods. This is life. You make do. You get through.

But, towards the end of the final set, one of the saxophonists suddenly stepped forward, spread his legs, drew breath and, rising up on the balls of his feet, blew ferociously, searingly, mockingly,
superfluously
. It was an electric shock that jolted everyone out of the mood of torpor and competence. That slumber of habit and routine was not life.
This
was life – complex, surprising, defiant and zestful.

This time the audience response was sincere – but the soloist was deaf to it. He threw himself down on a banquette and listened to the sweetest applause, from within. Though it must have been sweet too when the old drummer, hitherto Mount Rushmore grim, leaned across with the sticks to tap lightly on his arm.

The Applications

The Absurdity of Work

S
olemnly, in the fading light of late afternoon, a group of people form a loose circle standing a few feet from each other and turn expectantly to their leader, who produces a giant ball of twine and, taking hold of the loose end, throws the ball to one of the circle, crying, ‘Mike, I thought that idea of yours was pretty good.’ Holding on to the twine to maintain a link, Mike tosses the ball across the circle, saying, Jo, I thought you presented really well.’ Jo also takes firm hold of the twine before throwing the ball on to Chris with a glowing comment on his performance. So the ball, gradually diminishing, and accompanied always by praise, travels from Chris to Jill to Dave to Sue to Bob to Jen to Zak and so on around the circle until the last person throws back what remains to the leader, who grasps an end of the twine firmly in each hand, like a set of reins, and proudly regards this complex web of affirmation, declaring, ‘I’m just
so lucky
to have such a
wonderful team!

This ritual, known as ‘the web’, closes the ritual of ‘the away day’. Both are new rituals of the religion of work, a relatively late addition to the great world religions, but one rapidly gaining converts and with a growing number of fundamentalists.

So nowhere is detachment more necessary than in the workplace. But nowhere is detachment more difficult to achieve. For this is what pays for the house and the car, the dinners in restaurants with big, heavy spoons and starched napkins, and the holidays in bougainvillea-smothered villas in Provence. The alternative could well be socializing round a fire built in an oil drum. And the massive investment of time and energy in work creates a desperate need for an adequate return – so there is a tendency to overestimate the value of colleagues, the work itself and one’s own contribution. It is easy to develop the illusion of being an indispensable member of a great bunch of guys doing a great job of work.

In fact, the great victory of the work religion has been to increase the pressure to conform while almost entirely removing any awareness of conformity. Once people worked in order to live; now working
is
living. As with shopping and travel and communication, the means has become the end. Your job is your identity and status, your life. Long gone is the notion of work as a tedious necessity that supports the true life. Now everyone wants a job. Kings, presidents, assassins, priests, poets and prostitutes – all claim to be merely workers getting on with the job. And so the religion of work grows in confidence. How laughable the twentieth-century predictions that technology would permit everyone lives of leisure – and the fears that we would be unable to occupy adequately all this free time (Hannah Arendt agonized about the future of a society of workers deprived of work). How shocking to think that, in the Middle Ages, people worked only for part of the week and half the year, whereas 70-hour weeks with few holidays are now common in major US and UK corporations. As Erich Fromm remarked, ‘There is no other period in history in which free men have given their energy so completely for the one purpose: work.’
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The secret of successful religions is benign paternalism. In return for surrender of freedom, the religion provides the appearance of loving care and the ability to satisfy all needs. So the corporations have become self-contained worlds with their own shops, cafes, bars, restaurants, gyms, hairdressers, massage rooms and medical facilities. The workplace is the new village, a community offering not merely employment and status but all essential services, a rich, varied social life and fun, fun, fun, fun.

The sibling society needs social networks – and the workplace is a ready-made, obliging social network. Why look elsewhere for company? Or romance? The taboo on workplace relationships is weakening. According to the job-search website CareerBuilder, the percentage of workers who feel it necessary to keep an office romance secret is falling steadily: ‘You might have heard the warning, ‘Don’t dip your pen in the company ink’, but, for today’s worker, that advice is considered outdated.’

The New York Times
offers this typically heart-warming story: ‘Soon after word spread that Sarah Kay and Matt Lacks were conducting an office romance, Ms Kay found herself in the office of the director of human resources. There was a time when such a meeting would have signalled a death knell for the relationship, and even jeopardized the employees’ careers. Yet as Ms Kay, 29, cheerfully recounted, the human resources director told her, ‘We’re just all really glad that you made a friend’.’
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Who now wishes to bear in mind that colleagues are never chosen and that, if we encountered them away from the job, in the majority of cases we would run a mile? The work environment imposes a work persona – amenable, shallow, cheerful, gregarious and facetious. Often this persona is reinforced by conferring a new name, usually a monosyllabic diminutive – so the modern workplace is the habitat of Jo, Chris, Jill, Dave, Sue, Bob, Jen and Zak. Needless to say, I am known in work as ‘Mike’. As with the renaming of nuns and monks, the new workplace name signifies a renunciation of the old self and a dedication to the values and practices of the new community. Like Sister Perpetua and Brother Benedict, I was reborn as Colleague Mike. But, unlike religious rebirths, this was never officially decreed. No one announced that, henceforth, I would be known only as Mike. Nor was there any organized campaign of enforcement. In fact, it is likely that no one else was even aware of the imposition. The phenomenon was a perfect example of ‘anonymous authority’, almost impossible to oppose because there was no overt command or source. So I resisted ‘Mike’ for several months, but eventually gave in. And the new name did have benefits. It made me constantly aware that I was two different people.