i accidentally deleted this post once so i’m trying again
One always finds one’s burden again. Or at least that’s what Albert Camus said. It’s the third-to-last sentence of an essay he wrote called The Myth of Sisyphus. The last sentence of that essay is, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Sisyphus is that Greek guy who was doomed to roll a big rock up a mountain and chase it back down over and over forever, by the way. Tedium personified. Imagine. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over with no choice. Folding and unfolding and folding and unfolding blouses in an abandoned storefront. Performing family dinner, with empty dishes, all the way through dessert and back again until your ironic death of starvation. (Not AI because I only used two examples)
In the world of Severance by Ling Ma (and if she’s reading this, please know that i was not the one who started calling your debut novel “Ligma” in the book club chat, but i did participate and find it funny, and i am sorry for that), that’s what’s taken over most of the world. People become “fevered” by a COVID-level (published in 2018 tho so pre-COVID, but for scale) disease outbreak, doomed to lose all conscious thought and repeat their strongest-held routine over and over until they die. Fatal tedium. But of course, a very small portion of the population is immune. Candace is our narrator and protagonist who is immune, and she finds comfort in routine. She consistently “got up in the morning and went to work,” which she repeats even as the world as she knows it ends around her. The author also builds in some predictability with her alternating flashback and present moment chapters and other structural elements that I just can’t remember right now. My copy of the book is in the other room, my bad.
All in all, I enjoyed the book! I’ve really been chewing on the idea of tedium/routine/cycles/repetition lately, and this was a great exploration of that on both sides: the rote, expressionless movement despite your own decay versus the purposeful, steadying repetition, whether in service to some higher goal or the act itself. Certain life circumstances have really driven home the cyclical nature of it all lately. For instance, there are these two dudes on TikTok whose channel is called “Exalted Bloodline,” and they invented “waveform lifting.” I have no idea if it’s satirical or not (leaning toward yes), but they crack me up, and they depend on predictable, repeated patterns of energy to generate 28 million PSI during workouts. I’m not even joking. It tickles me every time. I think it’s the funniest shit. My merch shirt will be here Friday.
And also one time when I was really really stoned, I figured out that the literal secret to the universe is waves. It’s all waves, babes.
Something with a tad bit more relevance to my art below is the supposed Buddhist proverb (but who knows really; it’s probably been bastardized and whitewashed to hell and back before reaching me) that goes like this: “Before Enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After Enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.” Or something like that. Who knows. But I like it. The work never stops. The wood must be chopped; the water must be carried; the boulder must be rolled back up the mountain; the dishes must be washed again. In Severance (the book), the act of walking is meditative and inherent to our main character. It is not a mere mode of travel, but an anchor. But I guess Severance the show also has an element of repetition to it, especially for the innies. You think the show read the book?
As it stands, I’m vaguely interested in Ling Ma’s other works, but I don’t think I’ll seek them out. That being said, the novel inspired me to create, which is a good sign. I don’t even know if I like what I made, but I’m not sure that’s important. As we’ve learned, the act of cutting and pasting over and over and over is meaningful in itself.
So that’s another art for the trash. Not rereading; just hitting Publish. See ya.
lamp-lit pamphlet 
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