Looking up and seeing a few stars (not really seeing many at all, due to London light pollution) really gave me a good insight into the absurdist view in relation to Rhythmanalysis. A friend who I was outside with peered upwards and said the words (and I paraphrase) “Stars, eh? Really makes you feel insignificant.”. Except it wasn’t muttered in a frustrated, sad tone, it came out with a sense of gentle satisfaction. I’d been talking to him about my project earlier on in the day, and about how the whole Rhythmanalysis thing had come full circle with the Absurdism thing from last year, and I think he understood where I was coming from. Stars are just one more rhythm. Part of a daily-rhythm, they are only seen at night, but they are also engaged in their own universe-scale rhythms, doing a monumental dance with each other that is happening so phenomenally slow that we can’t hope to grasp a sense of their movement without long observation and the help of computers or maths. And compared to these massive rhythms, we exist in our own infinitesimal blips, in a comforting little nook of the universe.
So what if you’re late to work that one time?