What a great place for a mini break Madrid is, especially the wonderful galleries. I went with a group of friends and we spent hours in the Prado. One thing that continues to bother us is the painting of Sisyphus. We talk about it a lot. I now realise it has bothered people far and wide across time and place. Why, in Greek mythology, did Hades condemn Sisyphus to roll a ridiculously heavy rock up a steep hill, only to have it roll back down and for the process to begin again – for eternity: a curse of mind numbing, excruciating boredom, to say nothing of huge physical effort?
It’s a myth people seem able to identify with. I guess that’s one of the points of myths – to highlight some aspect of life by dressing it in story form. With Sisyphus, I reckon all of our group recognised their involvement in relentless and pointless repeat actions.
For me it’s weeding. You finish, you immediately restart – if you want flowers or crops to flourish.
One of our group, John, says he is the Sisyphus of family cooking:
‘First you have to get the shopping, then cart it home and do the chopping and cleaning. It takes an hour to cook it all and then the kids just wolf it down in three minutes. And the whole thing goes again the next day and the next. I can’t see an end to it.’
Another friend, Joan, has gone full Titian:
‘His painting haunts me. I keep seeing this huge oil artwork and I’m at its centre. My job, five days a week, is toil, toil. I get up, rush for the train, get pushed around, sit down to a boring and pointless pile of emails and paperwork. Same every day. Reverse procedure on the way home, and I arrive too tired to do anything more than watch TV. Weekends I just sleep. Then it all starts again on Monday. I’m just looking forward to retiring but that’s 30 years away.’
But one of the group, Edie, really puts in the hard yards. She suffers from acute myeloid leukaemia, so her life is a cycle of chemo, blood transfusions, remissions, reassertion of the fiend, and super human levels of exhaustion. She’s waiting for a bone marrow transplant and is, like Sisyphus, so far managing to cheat death, for now. She rarely complains, but just occasionally has a little scream about the pointless circularity of her life.
…..
At Edie’s funeral yesterday we, her friends, took stock of our futile repetitive lives – in the light of her death. ‘Maybe,’ John said, ‘there’s some comfort in having structure in life and in struggling with life’s needs – growing and preparing food, earning a living.’ ‘Maybe,’ Joan added, ‘however mindless and boring life’s tasks become, they are a way of cheating death’. ‘For a time anyway,’ I added. ‘Maybe pushing a boulder up a cliff is better than crossing the Styx.’
