Work and Hope

“Sisyphus drew down on himself the relentless wrath of Zeus. In Hades he was punished by having to try forever to roll a rock uphill which forever rolled back upon him” (Edith Hamilton, Mythology, 423).

“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus).

“Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,

and hope without an object cannot live” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Work without Hope”)

“You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” (Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable)

In “Sisyphys”, Stallings deploys the concepts of Work and Hope in a vital argument for a life sustaining balance with a surprising, but persuasive, bias toward Work. This clever, migrating poem ratchets through a concerted repetition of words and sounds, valuing the dumb expending through work and worrying the illogical, and even dangerous, stress of sheer hope. The poem concludes and deposits us in a cul-de-sac, coin-toss conclusion of acceptance where “the luck of all the draws/is the weight of stone”, resolving in a tacit nod to Camus, and a catechetical affirming through Coleridge.

It is difficult to determine if the voice of the poem is that of Sisyphus donned by Stallings or if it is Stallings herself refracting through the fate of Sisyphus where it mirrors our own. But knowing this seems unimportant where one keening message is the virulence of unalloyed hope. The central warning of the poem is unattached hope as a dangerous, expanding, unending condition where “when you hope/this draws to no close as day withdraws” and in it hope becomes an ever-grinding pursuit producing no result except a cramping paralysis and philosophical catatonia:

Awake, abject,

the conscious mind draws

into a ball; the Elusive

tongues it like the pit of an olive.

The vague, ultimately detached reach of hope in an unresponsive universe becomes madly self-consuming. Here, hope, by itself, is an infection of the human entity because it is unanswerable. So, if it is allowed to pursue articulation without earthly counterpoint – probably by our choice of work – we will spiral into the opiate of the desire to disappear:

The quirk

of hope

in recurrent nightmares is the hope

at last to be the object

of the murderer’s handwork,

when he draws

the knife to relieve

the stutter, to make passive

the massive

machinery of hope,

the broken record of alive.

One can infer that we need, on our own, “to make passive/the massive/machinery of hope”, not give up or give it up, but diminish its credentials or put it in ‘time out’ like a recalcitrant child. It must live as a silent presumption and twine with the work or actions, whatever they are, of our lives. It is not, and should not be, the opening lines of our poem as it is not in Stallings’s - work is:

It is good to work

the dumb, obsessive

muscles. Exertion draws

the mind from hope

to a more tangible object.

It is good to “draw the mind from hope” and its unsatisfiable questions. We do course through some bleak truths in “Sisyphus”, but we seem to be told, at the end, to place our hand on the oblique cornerstone of the Coleridge quote and, unstated, go on.

Work

without hope draws nectar in a sieve

and hope without an object cannot live.