Albert Camus wrote somewhere in his philosophical essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, that the best source for creativity is negativity. This negative source should not be mistaken for the popular stereotype of the depressive artist who, during a lifetime of downs but high productivity, one day finds love & loses art. If you have never read Camus' philosophical novels, like The Outsider, or his anti-Communist journalism in Combat, his whole thing revolves around absurdity, defined, in his case, as the clash between our desire to find meaning in a meaningless world without God. And even though absurdity is linked to suicide in Camus' absurd hero's choice between living or dying in a godless world, absurdity is not all bad. Absurdity is the positive clash between meaning & meaninglessness, desire & resistance. This double talk takes place during the Liberation when Camus' early friend & later enemy Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: “We are condemned to be free.” Out of this clash something begins; a noise emitted. Camus is good at taking a narrative — one that has been rehashed over time to checkmate an argument — & sweeping aside the pawns & pebbles to look between the rock & the hard place of such narratives, like the Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to push a rock up to the summit of a hill & then release the rock back down the hillside to the valley below. Instead of getting caught in the absurd & eternal push & pull of this narrative loop, Camus swiftly takes the elevator to another imagining outside the narrative, the moment between Sisyphus' release & retrieval of the rock. What is Sisyphus thinking & feeling in that moment when walking down the hillside to retrieve his rock? Camus writes of many emotions, even joy: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” What is important for Camus is Sisyphus becomes the absurd & tragic hero at the moment of release & retrieval because he is conscious of his burden & thus above it. There's things here that concern the artist & art-making. I'll let you decide what those things are. Anyway, read Albert Camus. His The Plague (1947) has gone through successive reprints recently for obvious reasons.