The Sisyphean Poet: On Facing Doubt and Anxiety in Creative Work

"It’s humbling to try to write another poem."

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.

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A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself!
–Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

It’s humbling to try to write another poem. For many poets sitting at the same spot on the couch holding the same mug of tepid coffee, looking out the same window, the great question is often “why bother?” Indeed, if in a particular maudlin state of mind, the next question becomes “why bother living?”

This is the high-stakes problem Camus proposes at the onset of his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, and what he calls the most important question of philosophy. Camus may not be an expert on mental health, but he wants to talk about the why bother part very much, and his philosophy can serve an intervention for poets looking for a new perspective on their creativity. Here we are, back again to where we started, with no momentum, no benefit from our previous exertions. Our prospective editors (read: tormentors) don’t care how many times we’ve succeeded in the past.

Certainly it’s rare to lurch from “Gosh, I’ve received a lot of rejections lately” to “Let’s ingest the entirety of the medicine cabinet.” Most creative people have the capacity to entertain disturbing ideations, including suicide, without any pressure to actualize them. There are likely other factors at play in such tragic cases beyond the inevitable losing streaks of the writing life. Which isn’t to say a sudden setback can’t spike your cortisol levels. Especially when everyone else seems to be winning awards and gaining traction. And when this experience seems to repeat, over and over again, the occasional stressor becomes something existential–it’s either you or the pen. The person sitting on that couch, sipping that tepid coffee does not literally commit suicide, but the poet, in that moment, can die just the same.

In light of this, perhaps a better way to frame Camus’ question isn’t why some people in particular commit suicide, but instead, why, as a means to recommitting to one’s work, suicide (or, by implication, any mode of cessation) ought to be weighed carefully, and then declined—not because it’s crazy to give up, but because continuing on is the even crazier option. Camus’ meditation on not giving up lies is the absurd, the absurdity of repeatedly pushing up a rock, only to have it slide back down again.

The world of writing advice is full of tricks and hacks to take the bad juju out of composition, but none seem to work, at least not for very long. Write first thing in the morning, while still in bed. Write the first thing that comes to mind. Record yourself talking. Meditate. Write on the bus. Write as if it’s a letter to a friend. Don’t use expensive notebooks that create expectations. Do use expensive notebooks—you’re worth it! On it goes. The dream of writing with lowered inhibitions leads many to alcohol and drugs, though once intoxicated, we forget more than our inhibitions.

All these tactics skirt around the surface instead of probing the root cause. They assuage our anxiety by mitigating the risks of feeling humiliated, instead of accepting that our doubt has a realistic basis. Success as a writer, no matter how it’s measured, is rare. Even celebrated poets write their share of duds (and some little else).

Deeper still, contemporary practice is but one facet of an art form with a long and rich tradition. Most techniques and themes have already been tried, and part of the futility of writing a poem is also this confrontation with precedent. 

Camus faces a parallel problem with respect to philosophy, and before he can offer his own ideas, he first surveys Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Chestov, Jaspers, Husserl, Kant, and Heidegger, who, Camus notes, “announces that [human] existence is humiliated” and “[t]he only reality is ‘anxiety’.” Like his mythic hero, Camus must repeat the same labor that has already been accomplished before.

“Let me repeat: all this has been said over and over,” he writes. The creative act is not merely about doing something new. It’s also a form of repetition–and the chutzpah–of going for it anyway.

Re-entering this repetition is fundamental to finding a path forward. We need to confront anxiety as a legitimate entity and find a way to play with it—get it to budge. This is likely going to feel more than a little undignified. As Camus puts it, “All great deeds and all great thoughts have ridiculous beginnings.” Camus wants you to be okay with feeling silly—after all, what have you got to lose?

Indeed, Camus states in his The Myth of Sisyphus that the realm of our imaginations play as significant a role as our more ostensibly rational activities:

It is certain that apparently, though I have seen the same actor a hundred times, I shall not for that reason know him any better personally. Yet if I add up the heroes he has personified and if I say that I know him a little better at the hundredth character counted off, this will be felt to contain an element of truth. For this apparent paradox is also an apologue. There is a moral to it. It teaches that a man defines himself by his make believe as well as by his sincere impulses.

Moreover, Camus understood creativity not just on a theoretical level, but a deeply personal one as well. He was an accomplished playwright and fiction writer, perhaps best known for two stylish and provocative novels that advance his existential philosophy, The Stranger and The Fall. Notably, he wrote The Fall around the same time as The Myth of Sisyphus, during the final years of World War II, and the two works confront a similar theme of futility.

When the Swedish Academy awarded Camus the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, they noted, “Behind his incessant affirmation of the absurdity of the human condition is no sterile negativism,” and in his acceptance speech, he highlights the ways in which the condition of the contemporary writer is characterized by contradiction and a “double existence” of trying to construct lasting meaning in the face of the destructive and corrosive push of history.

If Camus recognized how pointless it could feel to write plays and novels while the country of his birth, Algeria, underwent “unending misery,” it’s pretty easy for us to relate in the 21st-century, when literature itself seems pushed to irrelevance by current events and the swirl of social media. Nobody today requires a bookshelf-worth of philosophy in order to appreciate the absurdity at the core of creative acts.

Which doesn’t stop us from comparing ourselves to others. Our fear and doubt can cause us to envy those who seem to have a platform, a starting block, if you will. This is something Camus’ essay does not touch on at all, and perhaps that is by design. In his treatment of Sisyphus, there is no consideration of envy as a source of desperation and suffering because Sisyphus never compares himself to anyone else, as he is in complete isolation. Sisyphus’ punishment is not to be one of many rock-pushers. He’s the only one, sui generis. He’s not racing that rock against anyone else, only himself. Whether it takes ten minutes or all ten years is beside the point. Sisyphus’ effort is futile, but it’s also not a competition with winners and losers.

To truly do something unique, you only have to face yourself and your own limitations. Nobody else can help, nor hold you back. Doing your best is by definition all you can do. Envisioning Sisyphus with his “attaboy” attitude, a lunchpail type, Camus locates him not as an elite but an everyday bloke, a “proletarian of the gods” who is “stronger than his rock.” He continues his thankless effort not as a tortured denizen of the underworld but because he takes pride in it, because “at every step the hope of succeeding [upholds] him.” Our work needn’t be viewed as a load to bear. We can reframe it as an honor to raise.

Camus doesn’t sugarcoat it. His prescription for human productivity embraces the humiliation and requires a dark sense of humor. If you’re feeling cursed, that means you’re doing it right. Camus doesn’t tell us that Sisyphus is happy, or even should be happy. Instead, he ends his essay by stating, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

And if we refuse? There’s an imaginative leap into the absurd implicit in Camus’ final must.

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