The
Purposeless Striven Life: Ten Steps to Giving Up
By Cunny Hustard
From Stephen Covey's seven effective steps to Rick Warren's driven-into-purposituity,
self-help authors have generally drawn their inspiration from the spiritual:
God wants you to improve your Production Capacity, implies
Covey; God wants you to worship Him and that should be your purpose,
Warren says repeatedly and outright. Ostensibly, this is to aid us in
the trials and travails of this pale of tears, either in reaching those
bland middle-class goals or figuring out what to do with them once we've
achieved them. Warren, unsurprisingly, wants them spent on the church.
But those authors and the armies who have come before and after make
one serious mistake, Simone Albert argues in her new book The Purposeless
Striven Life: An Existentialist Guide to Graceful Living. Purpose,
Albert says, is pointless, a mere manifestation of our desperate and
eternal mystification, a substitute suffering projected back on the
self to avoid the infinite and inevitable Void, to elide the sure confrontation
with the Great Nothingness that gapes cavernous just a side-step from
being's narrow and rocky way. The point, she writes, is not to mind
it, or, at the very least for the sake of your friends, not to let your
green-gilled nausea show too awfully much.
In an early chapter entitled “Embracing the Void,” Albert
suggests that smokers contemplate the cancerous growths being engendered
with every puff, not to wean them off tobacco but to remind them, as
a sort of mantra, of the very absurdity of their existences in the first
place: “Make the first puff the puff of enjoyment,” she
opines, for
that is all you may ask of life. The subsequent puffs, drags, or
inhalations fraught with dependency unto dissolution, should serve
as reminders of the dependency the individual has on the Void, in
turn, reminding him of that being, that existant being the aberration,
and its dissolution being the state of normalcy, of rest. Then, the
cigarette finished, it is time to rejoin the party, for the cocktails
have begun.
In a chapter titled “Sartre's Wandering Eye,” Albert uses
that influential philosopher's visual distinction as an opportunity
to expose the great existentialist's vanity, and therefore his humanity,
frailty, and relative lack of essence, the very problem, she argues,
that plagues Modernity generally: “[i]ts obsession with self is
is not an obsession with existence; rather, it is an obsession with
essences, an attempt to assert meaning and purpose where there are none
by asserting a 'self' as an entity above and beyond simple or factual
being,” concluding, “Break all your mirrors!”
Albert notes that the need to go beyond the self, to “assert
a self-presence as a created world,” is what drives the need for
such inanities as cosmetics, war, television, employment, and, naturally,
self-help books, “by their name and nature” a form of illusion
brought on by the pernicious “ideology of the soul.” “If
the soul is in peril,” she writes, “that requires a need
to save it.” Saving an unprovable, unseeable, ineffable bit of
terminology turns culture into “an elaborate shell-game”
between bosses and corporations, workers and churches, priests and televangelists.
They mystify through incense and radio waves, megachurches and books
full of bad prose, direct mail, the “tools of tyranny” when
placed in the wrong hands. Selective reclusion, suggests Albert, is
key to surviving the onslaught with proper perspective of emptiness
and ennui intact. “Mass experience,” she contends, “is
a double-illusion, and a convincing one”--from the literal mass
of the Catholic church to the Jumbotronic, high-sonic, high-colonic,
ecstasy-inducing thrill ride called contemporary worship, to megaplex
movies and arena rock, all of which are designed “to create a
sense of meaning fused with impending imperilment, the only solution
to which is the ceding of the whole to the mass leaving a massive hole
created in the wallet.” Mystification along these lines, it seems,
is to create a need for repentance, therefore dependence, and, barring
that, or combined with that, a need to buy a discount salvation. Don't
leave the house too much, she says, and frequent only the cafés
you trust, and thus, as she titles another chapter detailing how most
easily to do this, “Act as All Men.”
It's not that Albert embraces a secular seclusion entirely, but pop
culture “threaten[s] to become a substitute illusion, pop culture
puffing itself into cloudlike forms, cumulus anvils” squishing
us between sky and ground and “filling us to the grillz”
with things to do and the “need” to do them: the opus of
consumerism has been played, and “played we are by the pied pipes.”
To shop en masse, she worries, is even more false than faith, and combined
directly with faith, is trebly illusionary. But that only happens at
Christmastime.
Albert's tongue, then, is only partially cheekbound when she writes
her perhaps most practical chapter, “Nausea for Fun and Profit
(but Mostly Fun).” Here she argues that absurdity itself is its
own reward: "Reminded of the simple pointlessness, the sheer shock,
of one's own existence, one is faced first with the sinking feeling
in the stomach's pit,” an attempt by the body to void itself “in
syncopation with the Void beyond,” but second “by letting
go of the need to mean, one arrives at the tragic silliness
of be.“ Taking time every day to confront the Void, to
project one's “self” perilously close to the edge, gives
one the opportunity to imagine that “self” looking back
from the Void, and thereby see one's “sack of flesh”
as “the mere stupid polyp it is,” the dumbshow of the genes
and the cycles of water and carbon, and thereby to “finally, freely,
freeingly, laugh.”
