Camus: Intellectual and Creative Salvation
an appreciation of Albert Camus by Robert Golden
The following was written as an introduction for a theatrical one-hander reading
from Albert Camus’ FOUR LETTERS TO A GERMAN FRIEND.
The performance was written and directed by Laura Fantini,
a talented, energetic theatre maker and a friend.
This first performance was in a small Tuscan town south of Sienna.
The live reading was given by a young actor, Francesco Pipparelli
with accompanying music and a soundscape by Luca Mauceri.
It fits in with the other essays I previously published
about the various writers, intellectual and philosophers
who have influenced me.
I was born in the American Midwest between the Appalachians and the Rockies
on a massive flat plain,
which was only just flatter than the isolationist regional culture.
I was brought up in a home where books were of no interest
and idea of less interest.
By good fortune I had a cousin, a few years older than me,
who was an ardent reader of French literature:
Malraux, Sartre, de Beauvoir and of course of Camus.
He introduced me to all the above
but in particular it was Camus who fertilised my young mind
and provided me with a profound humanist base
to look at what was around me.
This intellectual ‘stepping away’
allowed me to begin to see the world more objectively,
and to understand that what seemed to be irrational to me
was completely rational to those with money and power.
My/our repression was their exchange with us
for our exploited labour and our subservience to their power.
I felt personally that Camus helped me to see myself as a creative spirit,
and with that came a rebellion against the status quo and social responsibilities.
Camus wrote:
“To create today is to create dangerously.
Any publication is an act,
and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.”
And he wrote:
“The doubt felt by artists of today
concerns the necessity of their art,
hence their very existence.”
He helped me ask myself,
‘do we voluntarily listen to the cries of the poor, the wretched,
those injured mentally or physically by war (and refugees)
or do we forget them
until somehow they or others make a noise about their existence and plight?’
Camus prompted me towards my destiny:
I would learn I must become a voice for the voiceless,
that I would work towards making the invisible become visible.
These things would define me as a permanent outsider to the establishment.
With Camus’ prompting I would come to accept
that artists who work outside the boundaries of the acceptable discussion
are disregarded, isolated, unrecognized, frozen out of media coverage
making them as if they do not exist.
This has two purposes.
The first is to protect the curators, producers, managers etc
from being exposed to attacks from the right
as being anti-nationalist, anti-religious or anti-whatever
that casts them as turncoats to their own class or nation.
The second is that these actions help to undermine
the artist’s belief in the relevance and usefulness of their own production.
Camus showed me that our evolving 19th and 20th centuries
neoliberal led industrialized societies
decided to stamp the words ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’
on their churches and their financial houses.
This should have been a warning
that the concepts were being used as a rational to subdue and control others.
When one looks at neoliberalism’s mercantile history
and reads the statements of its supporters and promoters,
it quickly becomes clear that those two words apply
not to the mass of people enjoying a truly egalitarian democracy,
but rather to the freedom of the mercantile class
(now the rich neoliberals,
the CEO’s of transnational corporations
and the heads of the main financial institutions)
to do as they wish.
Using the politicians and political parties they own
through sponsoring their election campaigns,
they are able to get their political pawns
to reduce government oversite on the safety and stability of corporate activities,
to get their tax burdens reduced.
to reduce the size of the social democratic welfare state
and to convince nations to make war
while at the same time, stealing the wealth of their own people.
This shutting down of art’s main purpose
expresses why contemporary life,
viewed through culture and therefore the arts,
is so brittle and hollow,
providing little hope and less beauty for the average person to find meaning in.
Is it any wonder that shopping (consumption) has taken over as the main medicine
for people’s sense of emptiness?
With the reduction of art into meaninglessness,
the rich can be thrilled by their ownership of contemporary ‘masterpieces’
while the rest of us have our sensibilities made coarser
by the brutality, lusts, sexuality, dumbness
and cover-ups of reality in popular culture.
We are offered superheroes, special forces,
grumpy rebellious middle aged detectives,
not real people with real problems
caused by an extraordinary
gap between the wealthy merchants and the rest of us,
(except in the UK for the work of Ken Loach
and a scattering of a few artists elsewhere).
One of the consequences of this is that our reality is left out in the cold,
in the piles of meaningless rubbish in our consumer’s world.
Self-absorbed artists produce for themselves
(the mighty ‘me’ over ‘we’)
disconnected from any reality
which would prove to be meaningful to the broad mass of people,
but of value to decorate the rooms of the wealthy,
while also inflating in value year-by-year.
This is the art of the slave, producing an art of nothingness.
There are those groups and moments in history
when a rebellion demands that the artist must serve the movement
in order to clearly express the day-by-day reality of the largest number of people.
In that service their work becomes propaganda,
and therefore meaningless as art
because it no longer proclaims complex and troubling universal truths
but rather more limited points of view of political activists.
Art creates multidimensional dialogue whereas propaganda offers a command,
and is single dimensional.
The artist needs to exist and work between the demands of activists
and the markets of the wealthy.
In this paradigm
artists need to hold onto and believe in their own dreams
and visions of a better world
while also connecting to the reality of other people’s struggles.
If in their frustration as they turn away from the merchant’s commands
and the lives of the many,
they isolate themselves
when what they must do is to connect to that reality.
Camus wrote
“art lies in the perpetual battle between beauty and pain.”
This is also to say that art, not decoration, not entertainment
only emerges in the artist’s struggle to perpetuate justice and equality,
and to stand against the brutal violence and hatreds of neo-fascists.