Redtree Times

And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still.

—Albert Camus, The Stranger

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It’s a time that very much feels like something out of a piece of dark literature, something torn from the pages of Camus’ The Plague or The Stranger or Kafka’s The Trial.  There is something coldly oppressive in the atmosphere. The prevailing logic and language of the world seems alien and indecipherable. The world at large is indifferent to the lessons of the past. Or facts.

The world seems plainly out of rhythm.

Yet standing beneath the moon and the stars at night I feel a strange kinship, like Camus’ character in The Stranger, with the indifference of the universe to this all. It simply stares at us without pity, anger, sympathy or any feeling at all.

It just is.

And even though we might burn this planet to the ground so that it might one day flower again, it will always be.

That is a truth we cannot change.

I think that is what is behind this new small piece, 5″ by 7″on paper,  I recently finished.  It’s one the first things I’ve done in several weeks.

I think I will call it The Stranger.