Hopelessly absurd, starkly beautiful

MANILA, Philippines - When Joseph Heller said, through one of his characters in Catch-22, “I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long,” it was as if Heller had opened up my palms, handed me the words, and closed them up again. I held those words close to my chest for as long as I could remember. And sometimes, the words would beat madly along with my heart — they were like the chug-chug-chug of Yossarian’s bomber plane trying to flee the runway and escape the war; they were also the chug-chug-chug of my heart, pounding in my chest each time I’d find myself in a situation that damns me if I do, and damns me if I don’t.

In 1999, I was a fresh product of one of Manila’s universities. It was also the year I first read Heller’s novel, Catch-22. It was also the year (although I didn’t know it then) that Joseph Heller died. Obviously, it was a year of many firsts for me. In those days, life seemed to be unfolding, unraveling, one bloodied, nervous petal after another: I would get my first job, my first salary, my first taste of what that John Mayer song said about the “real world.”

Catch-22 assaults you with the insanity and absurdity of war, served up satirically by each of the book’s dozens of characters. And through it all, whether Joseph Heller intended or not, I navigated life guided by the Catch-22-ness of things — entranced by the book’s quiet but ruthless gathering of words, words that I felt described the absurdity of life itself. The book’s a lot more than about pointing a finger at World War II and plainly declaring “That’s batsh*t insane, right there!” Among many things, the book contaminates you with Yossarian’s realization of Snowden’s “secret” as Snowden lay dying in the back of a plane, as Snowden’s entrails slipped out onto the plane’s floor, the secret about how man is “nothing but matter”: “Drop him out a window and he’ll fall... Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage.”

        For instance, consider the main character Yossarian, the bombardier, who does not know why he is there, and does not want to die — in a spot-on existential sense, he is exactly like you and I, questioning the meaning of our own lives. Like Yossarian, how many times do we find ourselves running our mental and emotional fingers against the rough edges of that sense of being trapped in a crazy world?

But it would be grossly unfair to paint the book this way, in all its grim, satirical, brutal humor. As Horace Walpole once wrote, “Life is a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel.” Catch-22, therefore, can either be the funniest book you’ll ever read, or the most tragic. The book’s sense of comedy feels like a drowning man clutching at straws, but a drowning man with that Cheshire cat grin, dead certain of his indestructibility, of being beyond it all, beyond even his own doom.

You remember Catch-22, for example, when people complain about an ineffective government, but in the same bated breath shrug their shoulders and shake their heads in resignation. You sense the book’s truth when you realize, in one of those small, absurd moments, that you’re doing something wrong, but stopping it is wrong, too.

And most poignantly, perhaps, Catch-22 was there, in my head, when two years ago, my brother died. The three weeks we spent at the hospital, disbelieving, clutching at the straws of hope, were the three weeks I recalled, quietly, Yossarian’s mantra of “man is garbage.” One day, stuck in a taxi on E. Rodriguez, hopping from one drug store after another looking for that expensive emergency drug that could somehow prolong his life, in a hurry of thoughts, a culmination of all life’s misery swept over me: it all led here, to this point, me in this taxi, my brother in that ICU, conscious but knowing he would soon die. In the taxi’s backseat, I quietly snickered, and laughed and cried at the senselessness of it all, while at the back of my thoughts, there’s Yossarian saying that there’s nothing mysterious about God, that He’s forgotten all about us. After all, how can you revere some Supreme Being that created phlegm and tooth decay, and ultimately, pain?

Those were Yossarian’s words, but how it all felt like they were mine. When a friend asked me if I believed in hell, I said, “Hell is here (pointing at my heart), hell is here (pointing at my head), hell is you and I, living together with our unbridgeable, separate, desperate confusion.”

When my brother finally died on that hospital bed one sunny November morning, I felt like throwing at my brother’s body Heller’s words, hoping it could reanimate him. Of course, this wasn’t true — all I had in my mind back then was a white sheet of sky and the question, scrawled in the same clinical way “ICU” was painted on the door: “Why?”

I’d return to Catch-22 much later, when the grief had more or less subsided, when the disbelief had grudgingly given way to ambivalent acceptance, in moments of dark honesty. These days, when I jog to my brother’s final resting place at some memorial park in the morning, or when I try to force myself to be enthused about living from day to day, I remember Dunbar when he said we’re all like a “small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon.” And the only way to make life seem long is filling it with much unpleasantness.

“Who wants a long, unpleasant life?” Clevinger asks. “I do,” Dunbar says, “because what else is there?”

Indeed, what else is there? With all its tragic-comic, often insane qualities, life is an inescapable engagement, the only thing we have, despite its vivid, horrific Catch-22-ness. You take what you can get — the bad things and the good things — with your fingers crossed, hoping for the best. And maybe — just maybe — there’s one fine morning, like Yossarian, when we all finally “escape to Sweden” — take that as any useful metaphor you like, or don’t.