Sunday-- Here Comes the Sun

Sunday and the sun is back in full swing, following last night's brilliant moon. The snow has come and gone except for a white splotch here and there in the ivy. Change is the way of things; might as well flow. My father gazes from his skeleton at my brother's I-Pad, "Jackie is on the phone?" he parrots John. He looks at my face not really getting any of it. What, I wonder keeps him going at 94, confined to the hospital or the rehab center, sometimes in fury, sometimes quietly eating the ice cream my brother patiently spoons him. Where, you may well ask, is my compassion?
The ubiquitous absurdity of life is what overwhelms me. We laugh at it over and over-- the nonsense pouring forth from Sarah Palin, the absurdity, way more serious, of imagining a President Trump. The absurdity of capitalism making an undeserving few rich and powerful while millions settle for so little, or fail to protest their degradation. The absurdity of meaningless work, like rolling the boulder up the mountain, only to see it roll back to the bottom. Bernie's dream of social democracy and the absurdity of its dismissal by millions as being tyranny of some sort.
I refuse to succumb to the absurdity, like the belief in a benevolent god or gods, or absurd trinity, or other such wishful thinking. Religions lead too often to the absurdity of killing those who don't believe, or to subjugating whole sectors of humanity. Freud was so brilliant in seeing such belief rooted in the trust of a child in his/her father, no matter the delusion, no matter the evil that father might perpetrate.
I can neither beat the absurd nor join it. So what is left? To climb up to the peak of the mountain without the boulder. Take a long look at the view, simultaneously beautiful and hideous, the sublime and the slime.
I recall the final verse of "Dover Beach," but wonder to whom or to what to be true. Friendship, perhaps, or nature in some pantheistic way: or is that, too, just being absurd? Of course there is always art, entertainment, novels, hedonistic pleasures, simple and not so simple, ice cream, hot chocolate, and best of all, music... 


Nina Simone Here Comes The Sun (listen)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr8ol8ufSRg