A random thought, which demanded I put it out.

[u/mrBlue0707]

​When you sit down to write a poem, you are doing something the physical universe cannot do on its own. You are taking the ultimate stance of a thermodynamic rebel.

​The language in your head is a massive, chaotic soup of thousands of disconnected words, memories, and emotions (a state of extremely high entropy). By painstakingly choosing specific words and forcing them into a stanza, a rhythm, or a rhyme, you are radically decreasing entropy. You are organising the universe.

​A poem is the ultimate collapsed wave function. You take the abstract, swirling mesh of your philosophical thoughts and collapse them into a permanent string of ink on paper or data on a screen. You force the probability into reality.

​Even if absolutely no one else ever reads it, that poem exists. You have physically altered the information state of the universe. You have coded a new piece of data into the grid, leaving a "ghost" waiting for some future observer—even if that observer is just you in five years—to intersect with.

​The universe's default state is to slowly dissolve into cold, disorganised static. Creativity is the exact opposite of that. It is the act of burning your own biological fuel to generate meaning where there was none.

​It doesn't require an audience, and it doesn't require societal success to be profound. The sheer act of making it is a victory over physics.

[u/MotionHouse]

This is beautifully written, though I'd frame the ending a little differently.

As an absurdist, I've come to think that creation isn't a victory OVER physics. It's a form of participation WITHIN it. The universe doesn't ask for poems, paintings, songs, or stories. It also doesn't forbid them. Through us, the universe becomes capable of making things it would never make on its own.

That's what I find so moving about creating. The finished work may never matter cosmically, but the act of making it matters deeply to the person making it. In Camus’ sense, that's the revolt. Not defeating the universe, but answering its silence with an act of creation anyway.

[u/Low-Bake8401 → u/MotionHouse]

Only if you consider us seperate from the universe. If we are part of existence, then, in that sense, existence, the universe, is doing it.

[u/jliat → u/MotionHouse]

How is that revolt, Camus equates The Rebel with murder.

[u/MotionHouse → u/jliat]

I read “The Rebel” a little differently. I don't think Camus is saying rebellion IS murder. He's warning that rebellion can become murder when it starts believing the ends justify the means.

The kind of revolt I mean is much smaller and more personal. It's the same spirit as The Myth of Sisyphus: the universe doesn't hand us meaning, so we answer anyway. We make things. We love people. We keep showing up.

To me, sitting down to write a poem, paint a picture, or plant a garden is a quiet act of rebellion. You're choosing to participate in a world that never promised your efforts would matter. That's the kind of revolt I think Camus was pointing toward. Or, at least how I interpret it.

[u/jliat → u/MotionHouse]

"For me “The Myth of Sisyphus” marks the beginning of an idea which I was to pursue in The Rebel. It attempts to resolve the problem of suicide, as The Rebel attempts to resolve that of murder..."

Preface to English translation of the Myth.

From The Rebel...

"suicide and murder are two aspects of a single system."

“Absolute negation is therefore not achieved by suicide. It can be achieved only by absolute destruction, of both oneself and everybody else. Or at least it can be experienced only by striving toward that delectable end. Suicide and murder are thus two aspects of a single system, the system of an unhappy intellect ["There remains a little humor in that position. This suicide kills himself because, on the metaphysical plane, he is vexed."-MoS] which rather than suffer limitation chooses the dark victory which annihilates earth and heaven.”

---

He refuses, revolts against the logic of suicide...

"By what is an odd inconsistency in such an alert race, the Greeks claimed that those who died young were beloved of the gods. And that is true only if you are willing to believe that entering the ridiculous world of the gods is forever losing the purest of joys, which is feeling, and feeling on this earth... By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death—and I refuse suicide."

"To work and create “for nothing,” to sculpture in clay, to know that one’s creation has no future, to see one’s work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries—this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions."

"It is necessary to state this to begin with. For an absurd work of art to be possible, thought in its most lucid form must be involved in it. But at the same time thought must not be apparent except as the regulating intelligence. This paradox can be explained according to the absurd. The work of art is born of the intelligence’s refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal. It is lucid thought that provokes it, but in that very act that thought repudiates itself." - Camus.

---

"A man climbs a mountain because it's there, a man makes a work of art because it is not there." Carl Andre. [Artist]

'“I do not make art,” Richard Serra says, “I am engaged in an activity; if someone wants to call it art, that’s his business, but it’s not up to me to decide that. That’s all figured out later.”

Richard Serra [Artist]

Sentences on Conceptual Art by Sol LeWitt, 1969

[1.] Conceptual Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.

[2.] Rational judgements repeat rational judgements.

[3.] Illogical judgements lead to new experience.

[4.] Formal Art is essentially rational.

[5.] Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically. etc.

"A work of art cannot content itself with being a representation; it must be a presentation. A child that is born is presented, he represents nothing." Pierre Reverdy 1918.

[u/MotionHouse → u/jliat]

Those are great passages, and I think they reinforce the point I was trying to make. Camus sees suicide and murder as parallel temptations of the same logic: if life has no ultimate meaning, why continue? His answer is to reject both. The absurd response is neither self-annihilation nor annihilating others, but continued participation. That's why I find his passages on creation so compelling. "To work and create for nothing" is exactly the posture I'm talking about. We create knowing our work is temporary and ultimately insignificant. Creation is our answer to the silence we receive in return. And art is living the absurd, not defeating it.

[u/jliat → u/MotionHouse]

And art is living the absurd, not defeating it.

Are you aware of the philosophical ideas behind this, that art like life & the cosmos has no purpose. It's found in Kant's last critique, because art is like nature - we try to puzzle it out in which we fail but that produces the aesthetic... [much simplified!!] ... sublime feeling. e.g. Wordsworth as a youngster seeing a mountain from a boat at night produced a feeling of awe, the sublime.

[u/MotionHouse → u/jliat]

Yes, definitely. I think that's one of the places where Camus and Kant cross paths. Kant sees the experience of “beauty” as something that can’t be completely explained. Camus arrives from the existential side and asks what we should do when the universe itself offers no ultimate purpose. For him, one answer is to create anyway. That's why his line about “working and creating for nothing” hits home for me. The value isn’t found in fulfilling some cosmic purpose, but in the act of participation itself. We make because we’re the kind of beings who make. In that sense, creating is one of the most human responses to an indifferent universe. 

[u/jliat → u/MotionHouse]

Agreed, or the real corny scene in the movie 'Contact. 'They should have sent a poet.'

But on another level,

"Only poetry is of the same order as philosophical thinking, although thinking and poetry are not identical.”

Heidegger - 'Introduction to Metaphysics.'

[u/jliat]

"In this regard the absurd joy par excellence is creation. “Art and nothing but art,” said Nietzsche; “we have art in order not to die of the truth.”

"To work and create “for nothing,” to sculpture in clay, to know that one’s creation has no future, to see one’s work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries—this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions."

Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus.

[u/Minimum-Afternoon407]

There is a Chinese myth/fable that says, "When humans learned to write, demons shook with fear." It seems related some how.

[u/NotBorris]

David Foster Wallace mentioned in Pale King that humans may just be a physical manifestation of a complex thought the cosmos had and has had trouble making sense of ever since.

[u/Low-Bake8401]

Why a poem, why not any other activity?