The Oct 06 Essays: X - Oh my King Sisyphus!

Oh my Sisyphus! is this riddling piece of thing that well... erm... is riddling. I had the vision described in there. Up til the part of the Dali fairy. Maybe it's about how everything is futile.

Robin Williams (actor) and Che Guevera (revolutionary) and my mother (mother) and Salvatore Dali (artist) and I... we all do everything in futility. and Sisyphus is everybody's king. Except my mother is a little deviant here.

The essay below is written in the way that explains... who is sisyphus... again. I had referred to him in the first oct 06 essay. It's already Nov so I want to put out all the Oct 06 essays. Here's a little trivial about my personal life, today is a special day - 5 Nov 08 - I have been jobless for 4 months.

Oh my king Sisyphus! I should open a bottle of something and drink to him today!

Oh my King Sisyphus!

There has been a lot of mystery shrouding about the myth of Sisyphus, but he is undoubtedly one of the recurring heroes of my joblessness.

Sisyphus was a king of Ephyra (Corinth) in Greek mythology. It is rumored that he was a cruel king, but he is more famed for being the craftiest of men. He was a liar, a strategist, and a master of deceit.

Things seem to start going wrong for him when he went to tell Asopus (the river god), that Zeus (the sort of king of gods) was dating Aegina (the river god’s daughter). Then Asopus got angry with Zeus and Zeus got angry with Sisyphus. So Zeus asked Hades (the god of the dead, also Zeus’s brother) to chain Sisyphus in hell, but Sisyphus made a lot of noise about how Hermes should have came fetch him instead of Thanatos (death), and then tricked Thanatos to chain himself. After tricking a few more people here and there, Sisyphus went back to the human world to stay for a few years and enjoyed himself. He was finally carried back to the underworld by Hermes (who seems to be the god of many things including the cunning of thieves and liars).

As a punishment for his trickery, and especially of his betrayal to Zeus, Sisyphus was ordered to roll a huge rock up a hill. Before he reached the top of the hill, the rock will always escape him, and he had to begin again, and that he does for eternity.

Some people say that Sisyphus and his rock is the sun that rises and sets everyday. Some people say that Sisyphus is the tide of the treacherous sea. I say that Sisyphus is my soulmate for the tormenting ebb of the joblessness that dwells in me. Then again maybe the sun theory is all bogus, and he is just moving a rock around in the underworld. Nothing as glamorous as the sun would be true punishment, for Helios and Apollo must have their own ideas of their own realm. Similarly, there is nothing as cool as the tide of the treacherous sea that will be considered punishment. So, I am forced to conclude that Sisyphus is punished by just moving a rock around and is my soulmate for the tormenting ebb of joblessness in me. It is tormenting because I know that jobfulness is futile and boring. That jobfulness is pushing that rock up and joblessness is the time when he chases the rolling stone down the hill.

How great and capable is Sisyphus to trick so many people, but how dearly he is to pay with such a punishment. Will he one day stop for good? He must trick the nearby underworld dwellers to hold the rock in place for him as he goes gallivanting and exchanging name cards with me.

With technology and progression I’m sure that over the years he must have tricked some of his descendents who became engineers and architects to build him another system to move the rock.

And marketing executives to cheer them on and accountants to figure out the costing and the profit, and cooks to feed these buggers and event managers to entertain these people, and poets and songwriters to sing the futile lives of these people and teachers to teach the children of these people…

And I, the jobless, to feel tormented and touched and untouched and left out.

(For who am I trying to kid? Sisyphus is king. Free of his boulder, he is still king.)