Fragments of feeling

Yesterday, Insight Timer told me that “the absurd is the essential concept and the first truth,” quoting Albert Camus. It was Camus’s birthday last week — a fact that seemed to find me everywhere, even, oddly enough, with a London cabbie who started chatting to me about The Myth of Sisyphus somewhere between Victoria and Wimbledon.

Camus’s concept of the absurd is, by nature, uncomfortable. We humans like to think that everything is driven by reason and logic, that life unfolds with purpose, perhaps even under the guidance of some higher order. We crave coherence, a forward-moving, meaningful whole. But if you break that neat picture apart and look right up close, we are confronted with the possibility of it all simply signifying nothing. Like a Francis Bacon or a Picasso, the separate parts of the whole suddenly stand alone in grotesque distortion, fractured and reassembled into something chaotic, yet true.

To stand before a Bacon, and I did recently with my son at the National Portrait Gallery, is to witness the theatre of the absurd made flesh. His canvases become stages (or in his earliest work, cages) where religion, history and rationality are stripped bare. You stand before a world that has ceased to make sense, one that exists entirely outside our control. His paintings hold up a mirror to our isolation within the cruel absurdity of existence — and they do so unflinchingly.

And unflinchingly, Camus says, we must rebel against the absurd. That defiant confrontation — the insistence on life despite its incoherence — recalls the life-affirming and ground-breaking election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City last week. His victory felt like light breaking through the darkness. I’m neither American nor particularly political, but his win struck me as a perfect rebuttal to the absurdity of our times and to systems that insist on sameness, that pretend that change is impossible.

So, let’s bring this back to beauty, because that’s the gig. The same tension plays out here too: unchanging sameness versus a fear of difference, of the singular, of the beautifully imperfect parts that make up the whole. Isn’t that the wheel around which the old hamster of the beauty industry so desperately scurries? The relentless elimination of individuality (Botox, fillers, “re-profiling”) has numbed our sense to what’s real. Look back at photos from the ’90s. How wildly (wonderfully) different everyone looked. Now, in the pursuit of perfection, we’re melting our faces down into one waxy, plasticine sameness — or plumping up to something almost grotesque. That’s not the elixir of youth; it's the theatre of the absurd.

If last week taught us anything, it’s that sameness equals degeneration, while difference — the mosaic of distinct, clashing, hybrid parts — is what gives rise to meaning, vitality, and beauty. Camus wrote, “Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.” — We must imagine Sisyphus happy. Bacon sought sensation through fear: "I work as closely to my nerves as I can". Both were reaching for life — for feeling — in the face of the absurd. Fracture becomes the source of coherence, absurdity the ground of meaning and imperfection as the site of beauty.

Maybe it’s time we stopped numbing and started feeling again. Feeling into the texture, the complexity, the contradictions that make us who we are. That’s what Vanderohe is all about:  the gathering of every imperfect, beautiful part into something full of promise and light and life.