 Okay. Hi. Can everyone hear me? So far, so good. Okay, so going after Rob, right? So he just listened to music with you guys and it was fun and awesome and I made you read a kind of moody existential text. Yes. Okay. So you should have all found the link online or you can find it after class to Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus and you're only reading the last part of this where he discusses the myth directly. So this is what I want to talk about a little bit today but you might be wondering what I was doing with this. So first I'm going to give you a tiny bit of background. Camus is often identified as an existentialist despite the fact that he actually often publicly rejected that label for himself. So we can think about the ways in which labeling work and I think this is going to come up throughout the course in terms of putting people in boxes and categorizing them as following certain movements or certain traditions and the ways in which you might try and resist these labels or these traditions or the weight that comes with these categories. So I don't want to spend too much time on this because this isn't a course on existentialism but I thought I should tell you a little bit about what was going on in this movement that kind of started after the Second World War a little bit in the interwar period but largely got going after the Second World War and the big kind of hallmark of existentialism is this phrase existence precedes essence which you've got in blue kind of slanty up there. This was Sartre's phrase and basically what he meant by that is that we show up in the world and we don't necessarily have like a set goal or a set purpose so we don't know what it is exactly we're supposed to be doing with our lives. There were two branches of existentialism atheistic and theistic existentialism and you might think it's a bit weird that somebody could be a theist and be an existentialist but the way that that usually got cashed out was even if you believe in any kind of divinity or higher power you may still not necessarily know what that higher power has intended for you and you're still ignorantly in the same boat as the atheist existentialist trying to figure out what to do with your life. So it asks these kind of questions like what is it to be human what makes us human and what is the meaning of our life why are we here what is our purpose it's kind of heavy weighty questions maybe I should turn the music back on. So that gives us a little bit of background so why then did I get you to read this in a course where we have a theme of remake remodel Calvin and Hobbes is actually deeply existential just put that out there. Okay so because I think that a lot of the reasons why people return to things of the past is because they're trying to figure out exactly what it is they could do with their lives. So I have this Calvin and Hobbes cartoon why do we create maybe it's because we're looking for some big grand purpose or maybe we're just bored. Also you'll notice that Calvin is pushing the snowball kind of like Sisyphus pushing a ball except I didn't actually put that together until about 10 minutes before I started talking so I can't claim that that was intentional but I think it's very cool that Calvin's pushing a snowball and Sisyphus is pushing a ball up a hill we're all just rolling balls and wondering what we're doing. Okay so let me return back here to this the myth of Sisyphus and let's look at this Sisyphus character a little bit more closely so don't don't get nauseous as we zoom around here a little bit. So we have this quote from Camus the gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly roll a rock to the top of a mountain once the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than the futile and hopeless labor. Because every time the rock gets to the top of the hill it rolls back down and Sisyphus is he's eternal he doesn't even get to be released from this by death. His eternal punishment is to go back down the hill pick up the rock and start rolling it back up to the top again. In fact it's just a whole story a myth about repetition and that's what makes it so awful is that Sisyphus just has to do the same thing over and over again so if you've been keeping up at this point what I asked you to do was to read a text that repeats a myth about the agony of repetition and then we came in here and we started talking about the text that you read that repeats the myth about the agony of repetition. So we are now repeating the text that repeats the myth about the agony of repetition so we're just kind of intensifying the agony here maybe I don't know hopefully not but it does point to an interesting thing about repetition and about the character of Sisyphus himself because Camus says there's actually something else going on that makes repetition so bad repetition by itself is not a bad thing the myth is tragic because the hero is conscious what would his torture be indeed if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him so the myth Camus says is effective it feels kind of like a downer and weighty because the hero knows or the protagonist knows that every time he reaches the top of the hill the rock isn't gonna stay there isn't like he's gonna be done and he can go have a picnic or something no the rock is gonna roll down and he's gonna start his horrible ordeal all over again in fact Simone de Beauvoir who will read next semester said housework is kind of a Sisyphusian task right because you clean everything up if you do I normally don't but if you do you clean everything up and the dust and the grime and everything just comes back then you have to clean again and you're never done right it just keeps happening but it's our conscious awareness that when we clean we're gonna have to clean again that makes everything so bad so for Camus apparently if we weren't so aware of the futility of what we were doing the repetition by itself wouldn't be any problem at all not claiming the dogs are not conscious but I just really really like this in terms of finding repetition exciting instead of really depressing okay so back to Sisyphus because it actually is gonna get even a little bit worse so I really really love googling Sisyphus on the internet you can find a lot of very cool stuff anyway because there's a lot of things there's a lot of ways of reading this text in particular Camus the myth of Sisyphus or reading the original Greek myth of Sisyphus in which you start seeing Sisyphus as kind of this allegory for life why because what you're doing right now has been done hundreds of thousands of millions of Google plexus of time before you by other people by other animals by other living things right so we hear about this cycle of life and we're all caught up in it and what we're going through has been gone through before in fact we can even talk about some of the things Rob said when he first started his lecture in conjunction with this the whole idea of the realism versus the idealism and the kind of grim thought of realism that there is nothing new that everything stays basically the same so not only are you going through something that everybody else has gone through before but it's gonna be the same as it was when everybody else went through it before and in fact we can bring that down to a microcosm of arts one here so here you are in arts one your first semester at UBC and we've lined up a bunch of texts for you and you have other classes and what do you have to do you have to read your books and you have to do your homework and you have to write your essays and you have to go to your classes a lot of people have done that before you right a lot of people are doing that with you and a lot of people will do it after you and so you start getting this kind of feeling like well what's the point everything just keeps happening over and over and over again like this brings us back to these existential questions what's the meaning what's the purpose of it if it's all just the same if it's all just this repetition so it might not surprise you at this point to learn that a lot of people consider Camus to be a bit of a downer so I want to suggest that he's not necessarily or that he can be read in ways that are a little bit more uplifting but first let's kind of zoom in on Camus here so another Calvin and Hobbes deep existential question for you where he finds himself in the world as an existentialist does you find yourself in the world we were born at one point and we will die at another point and we find ourselves in the middle of this square of sidewalk or in the middle of life and realize that our time here is fleeting now this is actually the opposite of the problem for Sisyphus Sisyphus's life seems so meaningless because his life goes on forever right there is never an end to rolling this boulder but Calvin here in an existential moment of Calvin and Hobbes thank you Bill Waterson finds that the question arises for him precisely the opposite reason that his life is not forever that it is finite and so he finds himself here suddenly realizing well what's the purpose and then that freaks him out so much that he stays there all night so we want to make sure that doesn't happen hopefully because anyway another class is coming in here so you can't stay here all night thinking about these deep questions so let's see what we can do Camus tells us that myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them so this is kind of one of his more positive ways of thinking about the myth of Sisyphus and thinking about anything that you read or anything that you listen to or anything that you experience I mean think about some of the sampling that we heard in the best ways of sampling and piece of music or of covering a song the cover comes out radically different still pointing back to the original so you know what the source was but creative in its own right because imagination has been used so Camus says when you visit a myth the myth is there for you to use it for you to interpret it towards your own ends towards your own purposes and this is even true of the myth of Sisyphus in fact Camus is getting a little bit self-reflective here of himself because of course he wrote an entire book where he was looking at a myth and breathing life into it using his own imagination and now he's telling you when you approach his book that you should be breathing life into his book by using your own imagination thinking about the ways in which you can understand and reshape and repurpose the ideas that Camus is putting down which brings us I think to what's going to be a really interesting for me part of this theme that we have this year in arts one group B remake and remodel because we have this tension we have a tension between freedom found in your imagination in your understanding of what's going on and the structure imposed on you from the outside so Sisyphus has freedom he has his own conscious mind he has his own thoughts his own awareness he can push that boulder up quickly or slowly but he also has a structure this is the defined category of his life and when we think of Calvin on the sidewalk he has freedom in the sidewalk but he has defined boundaries as well so we get this kind of tension between freedom and structure and so in an effort to find the joy in Camus the myth of Sisyphus right near the end Camus tells us that of Sisyphus that his fate belongs to him he's his rock is his thing he knows himself to be the master of his days and then Camus concludes with one must imagine Sisyphus happy and I think the must is really interesting here one must imagine Sisyphus happy not just one can imagine Sisyphus happy I think Camus hopefully made the case that you can imagine Sisyphus happy because Sisyphus knows where he can apply his imagination and what he can do in the structure in order to change it and make it his own but Camus says you must imagine Sisyphus happy which seems a lot stronger to me this is a normative you must do it why must you well this is me repurposing Camus I'm gonna make a suggestion in remaking Camus the myth of Sisyphus I suggest that you must imagine Sisyphus happy because it's your imagination that is allowing for the freedom within the structure and so if you don't use your imagination and preferably use it positively you're just going to feel all the hopelessness of the structure so you can use your imagination to find the freedom and that's why it's a must you have to do this if you don't we just end up kind of following tradition over and over again unreflectively and if you've been reading the UBC you know a little bit about what can happen when that happens okay so for Camus the most interesting part in the Sisyphus myth is after the stone falls when Sisyphus gets to walk back down the hill I don't know how he's gonna walk down in this picture but this was the one I found but anyway when Sisyphus gets to walk back down the hill and roll the stone back up again because in this moment as he's walking down the hill he's put in the effort he's done the work he's achieved the goal that was right in front of him whatever that goal was for anyone in this case it's getting the stone up the hill but you could think of okay for next week making it through that conch reading okay I did it I made it through well great don't just throw it aside right this is your moment to sit and think about what you want to do with this and so Camus is really interested in that moment when Sisyphus has completed the task at hand before he picks up the stone again as a moment of creativity and reflection and so that's why I really want to stress the re and remaking and separate it from the make we have re and we have make we are picking up on things that have happened before but we are making them our own and so I want to suggest that there's actually a relationship between remaking and creating within this structure and that's why I chose the myth of Sisyphus this year as my opening to the arts one theme so think I've come in short which is good so we're kind of back on time so that's it from me thank you