Start Over, Then Back Again

By: Victoria G. Smith

 

Farida Pacha begins her documentary film, “My Name is Salt”, with a quote from Albert Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus”: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” It is a perfectly apt introduction for a film that portrays the Sisyphean toil of no less than forty thousand people in the Gujerat desert of India to literally coax salt out of the briny desert through the work of their mostly bare hands and feet. The process spans eight months of hard labor that begins at the end of the monsoon season and lasts until before the next rains flood the desert again, turning the baked, cracked earth into a sea that washes away the salt miner’s carefully sculpted salt beds, which then have to be carved out of the muddy earth again when the next salt-making season begins.

After watching this film, I couldn’t move from my seat. I must have sat still for at least fifteen minutes until I tasted salt on my lips, realizing it was my tears. My heart was filled with compassion, sadness, and pity for those human beings—young and old alike, who have to endure such back-breaking work in the scorching, blinding desert, living in make-shift tents and crudely-made shacks during those seemingly endless eight months in the salt fields—merely to survive. I vowed never to take salt for granted again, to never waste even a crystal of it, if I could help it. Those people are the true salt of the earth. From now on, I shall consume salt with reverence, out of respect for the nobility of human labor that brought it to my table.

To feel compassion is a good thing. But sadness and pity? Some part of me immediately questioned my motive for such condescending attitude. Surely, I thought, Pacha’s decision to begin her film with the Camus quote meant more than to elicit compassion, sadness, or pity for the salt miners. One does not have to read Camus’s essay to understand that the filmmaker is asking a philosophical question: Is our life worth living when we know our toil will be endless and our goals unattainable?

I bet many of us would say living the salt miners’ life would be like a living hell. And yet, surprisingly, that is not what I saw in the way the salt miners and their families appeared to live their lives. Everyday, they worked without complaint, even when the salt trader, by paying them pittance for their priceless labor, effectively washed away any profit they had hoped to gain. They did not break down into hopelessness when their precious water pump broke down, threatening to completely shut down their operations and thus, their livelihood. Instead, they calmly used their heads to figure out a rational way, through their crude tools and elementary knowledge of mechanical engineering, to rig out a repair of the pump. They did not whine when their bodies ached at the end of a long day; instead, they took turns massaging each other’s sore limbs and muscles. And they took time for joy, to celebrate with their neighbors—washing, shaving, and donning their best clothes and adornments—to attend a simple season-end’s fair. And when it was all over, they quietly packed up their meager possessions and buried their tools deep in the earth, knowing they’d have to dig them up again—crust, rust, and all—come next season.

But how could they do it all over again, I asked myself. How could they bear to live such a seemingly meaningless and hopeless existence? A loaded question for all of us, indeed, at this start of yet another year of our lives. It is here where actually reading Camus’s essay could be instructive.

Camus tells the the story of Sisyphus, who was cursed by the gods to push a huge and heavy rock up a mountain, only for the rock to roll down from the summit so that Sisyphus has to push it back up again—for eternity. Yet it isn’t so much Sisyphus’s seemingly futile toil that interests Camus—it is the point where, at the peak of the mountain, Sisyphus realizes his fate. Camus states, in almost perfect poetry:

“…. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy….

…. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” (http://dbanach.com/sisyphus. htm)

In other words, Camus proposes that despite our absurd existence— absurd, because of the conflict between our desire for meaning and order in our lives and what life actually delivers—we still have the power to choose to give meaning to life and accept our fate, and by such surrender, triumph over it.

In the end, it thus appears, it is not the seemingly wretched salt miners of Gujerat who deserve pity but I, for compared with the former, I, whose idea of a meaningful life is still limited by parameters dictated by other human beings, have not yet learned to surrender to the inherent absurdity of life. I am not yet fully myself because I do not yet have the courage to completely break free of humanity’s bandwagon definitions of success, and therefore have not yet become a fully conscious human being. So this is my new year’s resolution: to simply be a mindful witness to my life, and by this singular act of consciousness, triumph over the gods of fate and thereby imbue my life with indestructible meaning and purpose. I wish you all, dear readers, a mindful new year!