The Brooklyn Rail

Wake up. Think about showering. Neglect to shower. Self-loathe. Stumble through the day in a haze. Eat something (maybe). Eventually return to bed. Sleep too much, or not enough. Repeat.

I first began thinking about the concept of “Sisyphean time” in relation to my experiences of depression, in which the relentless transition from morning, to afternoon, to night is best analogized as the impossible act of rolling a boulder up a steep hill. In depression, tasks, goals, and interpersonal relationships are drained of their previously-held significance. Meaning and purpose give way to exhaustion and dejection. All acts become Sisyphean.

Structurally and affectively, the COVID-19 pandemic shares many similarities with the depressive experience, especially as defined by the need—emotional or pragmatic—to isolate oneself socially and/or physically. Both experiences might constitute a sense of hopelessness and uncertainty about the future. Both may be proximate to, or preoccupied with, death. Both entail slowness and delay. Both involve a fracturing of “the collective” and “the real” (in the case of the pandemic, for example, anti-Black violence, discoveries of mass graves at the sites of former residential “schools” for indigenous children, and widespread conspiracies and misinformation exposed the harms and disunity of white-supremacist, settler-colonial society). Finally, both engender a sense of fatigue, detachment, repetition, and monotony. Each hazy day feels like the one before, and like the one after. Even crisis becomes ordinary.

In September 2020, almost one year into the COVID-19 pandemic, the psychology magazine, Psychology Today, published an article asking, “Is Repetition the Key to Daily Practice—or Its Killer?”¹ Similarly, I have wondered what differentiates the absurdity of Sisyphean routine from reparative ritual.

In her 2012 book Depression: A Public Feeling, queer affect scholar Ann Cvetkovich discusses the meditative daily practice of Abbot Paul as described by the fourth-century Christian monk John Cassian. Abbot Paul’s practice “of collecting palm leaves serves no purpose other than to keep him occupied[…] At the end of the year, when his cave is full of palm leaves that he doesn’t need, he burns them.”² Cvetkovich draws a parallel between this medieval process-oriented practice and “time-based performance art practices in which ordinary activities take on aesthetic significance through repetition and intentional framing.”³

I would extend Cvetkovich’s parallel further to include documented performances and video artworks, which are commonly exhibited in gallery spaces “on loop.” Performed fifteen years before the COVID-19 pandemic, Jon Sasaki’s Ladder Climb (2006) offers a how-to guide for embracing the pointless and absurd. In it, the Toronto-based artist attempts, again and again, to climb a free-standing extension ladder. In conspicuous futility, the ladder leads nowhere and reaching the top yields little reward beyond momentary self-satisfaction. And yet, Sasaki shows no contempt for the ladder or the act of climbing it. (As Albert Camus wrote, “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”⁴) After each fall, Sasaki re-sets the ladder, adjusts his grip, and places a foot on the rung. He prepares to roll the boulder back up the hill.

Lee Edelman reminds us that “flourishing” is not so different from “lives that don’t work.”⁵ He suggests that life is “structurally inimical to happiness, stability, or regulated functioning, and that only the repetitive working through of what still doesn’t work in the end […] constitutes the condition in which something like flourishing could ever happen.”⁶ It is worth considering if and how performances of futility might teach exhausted pandemic-endurers and depressives alike how to live with feelings of fruitlessness and repetitiousness that, at certain moments, feel empty enough to destroy us.

1. Eric R. Maisel, “Is Repetition the Key to Daily Practice—or Its Killer?” Psychology Today, September 18, 2020.
2. Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 112.
   
3. Ibid.
   
4. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 123. Originally published in France as Le Mythe de Sisyphe by Librairie Gallimard, 1942. Translation first published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1955.
   
5. Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), 11.
   
6. Ibid.