Don Giovanni and Don Juan

 Leporello in Don Giovanni

The world - as Camus would have it and I agree - is unreasonable. Our ways of understanding try hard to make various images and icons of the stuff of reality, but we fall far short.

Camus describes how the absurd man may live: revolution, freedom, and passion. Since reality is absurd, there are no ethical rules, and "Everything is permitted" is a statement of fact. Don Juan, the serial seducer, who recognizing these facts, lives the life of the passions to the fullest. "There is no noble love but that which recognizes itself to be both short-lived and exceptional."

With this I disagree, for it is not what I have observed in life, not by a long chalk.
My disagreement lay in the fact that I do not think all that highly of reason in the first place. Hence, a recognition of the irrationality of reality is hardly a major problem. And even though everything may be permitted, it does not follow then that everything may be done, nor must be done; a permission to act is not an order to do so.
(Here the disappearance of moral law is not carnival and licentiousness after all, but a shouldering of the burden by Mankind which no longer may fall back on the old alibi of Original Sin! Whether the devil exist or not, we cannot act like children and say the devil made us do it.)
As children we follow rules; as adults we put away the things of children and order our lives willingly and freely. But we can only do this if we fully engage life. Children do not fully engage with life; they are still in a stage of tutelage and learning:  their passions are schoolboy crushes, their angers are fleeting and forgotten with the new day, their faith is the words of their elders.
Only as adults do we fully engage.
But only then if we have put away childhood toys.....
(Once I had a dream of a Torah scroll spinning like a dreidel..... my understanding of that ancient law was a manufactured toy, like a glorious iPad of spiritual dimensions....
God could not be as small as I!)

We think too highly of sex. Because of its totem power and its taboo and its pleasure, we think that anyone who pursues a life of passion is fully engaged in at least one facet of life: that of bodily desire. But that is not the case. Don Juan's serial fornication was a ploy to ignore life, to maintain himself so busily occupied in passion that he had no time for the long-term of Life.
Don Juan hoarded passion.
If Sex came with newspapers and plastic bags, Don Juan would have been indistinguishable from a hoarder living in a house filled to the ceilings with accumulated junk.

The absurd pursuits of our present age are all obsessively and compulsively aimed at engaging Life in the short-term, gobbling little pieces: seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, and years, but not at engaging Life in the long-term.
Even our businesses run this way; even businesses we believe that we are so wrapped up in and so engaged in during our lives: they are mostly designed to brings short-term Pavlovian stimuli and keep us blinded to the long-term: our futures and the future of the human race.
It is not a matter of saying that we must make a living and who are we to attempt to affect the future of the human race! For the business of all of us is humanity! Not just economic man, but humankind in its entirety: it is a passionate engagement in Life! Not a "job" from which we retire after 30 or 40 years.

Sex today is pornography designed to pre-occupy our passionate minds and waylay them into stupid and futile pursuits.  We have allowed this to happen  just as we have let our commerce and our politics become pornographic pantomimes of themselves.

When I wrote a few days ago that Faith is Water, most readers took that as a metaphor; it was not. It was an experience.
Everything is an experience. Reality does not exist for our pleasure nor as a source of metaphor and poetry: it exists to experience as adults, as the most perfect beings we can be.

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