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The Lost Notebooks of Sisyphus: A Novel with Commentary
For nearly three thousand years, King Sisyphus of Corinth has been one of the most compelling characters in world mythology. The iconic image of Sisyphus putting his shoulder to the boulder and pushing it to the summit of a mountain in the Underworld is recognizable the world over. To many poets and philosophers, from Homer and Aeschylus to Lucille Clifton and Albert Camus, the rebel hero has been a powerful symbol for hard-earned wisdom and the struggle to transcend suffering, while more skeptical commentators have interpreted Sisyphus' defiance of the gods as futile and doomed. In this mythopoetic novel, Phil Cousineau reimagines Sisyphus as telling his own tale through notebooks he kept while enduring his notorious punishment, which include surprising revelations about the self-sacrifice he made for his fellow Corinthians, his bold fight against the injustice of the gods, and the unbounded love for his wife and sons that earned him a second chance at life. The Lost Notebooks of Sisyphus is a timeless allegory that helps us come to terms with our own daily struggles and shines new light on Camus' existential conclusion that, "We must imagine Sisyphus as happy." I am Sisyphus, King of Corinth, great-great-grandson of Prometheus, great-grandson of Deucalion and Pyrrha, grandson of Hellen and Orseis, son of Aeolus and Enarate, husband of Merope, father of Glaucus, Ornytion, Almus, and Thersander, and grandfather of Bellerophon, slayer of the Chimera. I am a champion of navigators, sailors, athletes, merchants, poets, and playwrights, and an enemy of tyrants, despots, bullies, ruffians, and demagogues. I honor the gods and goddesses by building splendid temples, holy shrines, and sacrificial altars worthy of their glory. Many men deep am I, as my mentor, the deep-browed, long- bearded, wise-counseling Alexandros of Milos described me. What I am not is a scoundrel, as scandalmongers have impugned across the centuries while exonerating the cruel gods who condemned me.
145 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2004
14 people want to read
About the author
Phil Cousineau
81 books93 followersPhil Cousineau is a writer, teacher, editor, independent scholar, documentary filmmaker, travel leader, and storyteller. The author of more than 30 nonfiction books, Cousineau has more than 15 documentary screenwriting credits to his name, including the 1991 Academy Award-nominated Forever Activists. His life-long fascination with art, literature, and the history of culture has taken him on many journeys around the world; one of his bestselling books is The Art of Pilgrimage, inspired by his many years of meaningful travels.
Born in an army hospital in Columbia, South Carolina, Cousineau grew up in Detroit, and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 30 years. American mythologist Joseph Campbell was a mentor and major influence; Cousineau wrote the documentary film and companion book about Campbell's life, "The Hero's Journey." The “omnipresent influence of myth in modern life” is a thread that runs through all of his work. He lectures frequently on a wide range of topics--from mythology, film, and writing, to sports, creativity, travel, art, and beauty. Currently he is the host of the much-praised “inner travel” television series, Global Spirit, on Link TV and PBS, and is finishing a book on beauty.
Born in an army hospital in Columbia, South Carolina, Cousineau grew up in Detroit, and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 30 years. American mythologist Joseph Campbell was a mentor and major influence; Cousineau wrote the documentary film and companion book about Campbell's life, "The Hero's Journey." The “omnipresent influence of myth in modern life” is a thread that runs through all of his work. He lectures frequently on a wide range of topics--from mythology, film, and writing, to sports, creativity, travel, art, and beauty. Currently he is the host of the much-praised “inner travel” television series, Global Spirit, on Link TV and PBS, and is finishing a book on beauty.
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June 7, 2010
"A Riff on the Color Blue"
The Blue Museum by Phil Cousineau
Sisyphus Press, September 2004
In early Christian times, the liturgical colors were black, gray, brown, red, violet, and dark green, meant to convey suffering and grief. Blue was considered barbaric and evil. In fact, most Cistercian churches were devoid of color, and it wasn’t until the twelfth century that the powerful Abbot Suger (of the abbey of St. Denis), who believed that color was a manifestation of God, was able to bring the full palette back into the church. It was under his realm that a specific blue was developed by stained-glass artisans to depict the robe of Mary, which later led to Kings adopting blue as a popular royal color.
In today’s Western culture the color has many associations: sky blue, midnight blue, baby blue, navy blue, royal blue, Blue Ribbon, Blue Monday, blue blood, feeling blue, the Blues, true blue, a bride’s “something blue,” Bluebook, out of the blue, Old Blue Eyes, a robin’s egg, and Old Glory’s red, white, and blue. It can be calming and soothing, yet in Iran it is the color of mourning.
Phil Cousineau’s The Blue Museum is his first book of poetry since his astounding Deadlines: A Rhapsody on a Theme of Famous and Infamous Last Words, published in 1991. The title was inspired by his perceiving an aura of blue around his wife’s pregnant belly before she gave birth and around their young son, Jackie Blue, ever since.
Cousineau is not a jazz musician, yet he thinks and writes as one. The protégé of Joseph Campbell, he journeys into the deep recesses of Soul, weaving mythology into his very personal stories as he riffs through words and phrases with his horn-of-choice, the pen.
In reading Cousineau’s poetry I can imagine distant strains from Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” playing in the background. It’s a sweet irony that one of my favorite soulful jazz albums aligns so perfectly with these works by a man who has been writing about Soul all his life. Of his 19 books, “Soul” is in the title of four, and through them all, soul pervades.
Of his poem “Memoricide,” Cousineau writes, “This poem was first written the night of the bombing of the Sarajevo Library, as others have been moved to immortalize the tragic night. See the Serb poet Goran Simic’s poem, ‘Sarajevo,’ especially the lines ‘Set free from the stacks / characters wandered the streets / Mingling with passers-by and souls of dead soldiers.’” Another link to Soul. And yet another in Cousineau’s “Earthbones”:
The aborigines say when you die you go sky,
when you in trouble you go forward
into outback, you dig up your stone
you bury it where no one can find
it but you, and before you don’t
know it, you’ll be out of
trouble. Or so says
the dreamtime
painter, to me
on the Sydney
docks,
a ritual
I can dig,
down to the
depths of my soul
that, he says, as we journey
toward the ruined world, looking
for clues to restore our perdurable
secrets. Yes, the aborigines say when
you die you go sky, but I don’t know,
I only know when you live your sapphire
blue soul is flung like an earthbone boomeranging
from one world to another and back again, over and over.
Traveling figures greatly in Cousineau’s writings, for he has traversed the globe many times in the last thirty years. His The Book of Roads vividly brings to the reader the smell of fresh bread in the little town of Colares, Portugal; the “soft, ginger-colored light” in an ancient amphitheater in southern Turkey; and the sounds of rebeks, tambourines, and goatskin drums near the Djama el Fna plaza in Marrakesh. When Cousineau writes of “place,” he owns every step of the way. Those are his footprints, yet he allows readers to slip their feet into the still-warm impressions, giving one the sense of being there and smelling, seeing, and hearing the richness of his travels.
The Blue Museum is equally itinerant with its visits, in Part I alone, to Alexandria, Dublin, Genoa, Cannes, Sonoma, and Detroit. It consists of galleries containing a great collection of things blue: a blue guitar in “Fretting,” the watery world of “Proteus,” Van Gogh’s “seeking for blue” in “Vincent’s Search,” and Anna Akhmatova, waiting for hours outside a St. Petersburg prison to see her incarcerated husband, who saw a woman with bluish lips standing in line behind her in “Bluish.”
He plays with the word in “The Strange Flow of Synchronicity”:
Mama told me money didn’t grow on trees.
Papa talked a blue streak to me about the way he blew it,
Adding, contritely, that I better hold onto it because it had wings
And would fly out of my pockets as if it had a mind of its own.
And “The Samurai Poet” ends with:
On the wooden planks
where he had been standing
there is a dusky blue light,
like the afterglow left
by a conflagration of fireflies
who spent the last night
of their short-fused lives
flaring forth light
in a world of
darkness.
Cousineau’s Museum presents blue in ways far more eloquent than did I in the second paragraph of this review. With each succeeding poem it is a delight to see how he approaches the color, stated or not. Had I another hand, I would rate this book “three thumbs up.”
The Blue Museum by Phil Cousineau
Sisyphus Press, September 2004
In early Christian times, the liturgical colors were black, gray, brown, red, violet, and dark green, meant to convey suffering and grief. Blue was considered barbaric and evil. In fact, most Cistercian churches were devoid of color, and it wasn’t until the twelfth century that the powerful Abbot Suger (of the abbey of St. Denis), who believed that color was a manifestation of God, was able to bring the full palette back into the church. It was under his realm that a specific blue was developed by stained-glass artisans to depict the robe of Mary, which later led to Kings adopting blue as a popular royal color.
In today’s Western culture the color has many associations: sky blue, midnight blue, baby blue, navy blue, royal blue, Blue Ribbon, Blue Monday, blue blood, feeling blue, the Blues, true blue, a bride’s “something blue,” Bluebook, out of the blue, Old Blue Eyes, a robin’s egg, and Old Glory’s red, white, and blue. It can be calming and soothing, yet in Iran it is the color of mourning.
Phil Cousineau’s The Blue Museum is his first book of poetry since his astounding Deadlines: A Rhapsody on a Theme of Famous and Infamous Last Words, published in 1991. The title was inspired by his perceiving an aura of blue around his wife’s pregnant belly before she gave birth and around their young son, Jackie Blue, ever since.
Cousineau is not a jazz musician, yet he thinks and writes as one. The protégé of Joseph Campbell, he journeys into the deep recesses of Soul, weaving mythology into his very personal stories as he riffs through words and phrases with his horn-of-choice, the pen.
In reading Cousineau’s poetry I can imagine distant strains from Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” playing in the background. It’s a sweet irony that one of my favorite soulful jazz albums aligns so perfectly with these works by a man who has been writing about Soul all his life. Of his 19 books, “Soul” is in the title of four, and through them all, soul pervades.
Of his poem “Memoricide,” Cousineau writes, “This poem was first written the night of the bombing of the Sarajevo Library, as others have been moved to immortalize the tragic night. See the Serb poet Goran Simic’s poem, ‘Sarajevo,’ especially the lines ‘Set free from the stacks / characters wandered the streets / Mingling with passers-by and souls of dead soldiers.’” Another link to Soul. And yet another in Cousineau’s “Earthbones”:
The aborigines say when you die you go sky,
when you in trouble you go forward
into outback, you dig up your stone
you bury it where no one can find
it but you, and before you don’t
know it, you’ll be out of
trouble. Or so says
the dreamtime
painter, to me
on the Sydney
docks,
a ritual
I can dig,
down to the
depths of my soul
that, he says, as we journey
toward the ruined world, looking
for clues to restore our perdurable
secrets. Yes, the aborigines say when
you die you go sky, but I don’t know,
I only know when you live your sapphire
blue soul is flung like an earthbone boomeranging
from one world to another and back again, over and over.
Traveling figures greatly in Cousineau’s writings, for he has traversed the globe many times in the last thirty years. His The Book of Roads vividly brings to the reader the smell of fresh bread in the little town of Colares, Portugal; the “soft, ginger-colored light” in an ancient amphitheater in southern Turkey; and the sounds of rebeks, tambourines, and goatskin drums near the Djama el Fna plaza in Marrakesh. When Cousineau writes of “place,” he owns every step of the way. Those are his footprints, yet he allows readers to slip their feet into the still-warm impressions, giving one the sense of being there and smelling, seeing, and hearing the richness of his travels.
The Blue Museum is equally itinerant with its visits, in Part I alone, to Alexandria, Dublin, Genoa, Cannes, Sonoma, and Detroit. It consists of galleries containing a great collection of things blue: a blue guitar in “Fretting,” the watery world of “Proteus,” Van Gogh’s “seeking for blue” in “Vincent’s Search,” and Anna Akhmatova, waiting for hours outside a St. Petersburg prison to see her incarcerated husband, who saw a woman with bluish lips standing in line behind her in “Bluish.”
He plays with the word in “The Strange Flow of Synchronicity”:
Mama told me money didn’t grow on trees.
Papa talked a blue streak to me about the way he blew it,
Adding, contritely, that I better hold onto it because it had wings
And would fly out of my pockets as if it had a mind of its own.
And “The Samurai Poet” ends with:
On the wooden planks
where he had been standing
there is a dusky blue light,
like the afterglow left
by a conflagration of fireflies
who spent the last night
of their short-fused lives
flaring forth light
in a world of
darkness.
Cousineau’s Museum presents blue in ways far more eloquent than did I in the second paragraph of this review. With each succeeding poem it is a delight to see how he approaches the color, stated or not. Had I another hand, I would rate this book “three thumbs up.”
Read
April 7, 2011Phil Cousineau gave me this book in February of 2005. Many of his books were sent to me in '97. I'm glad I didn't read the Blue Museum until now. I just finished Phil's books about the Soul. Not all of them, just "Soul Moments" and, "Soul an Archealogy" Now, I'm reading poems by Phil. The earlier works were mostly other's work and Phil's comments. This book comes from Phil's heart and soul. This reason I'm glad I waited was that his earlier books opened my eyes to what Phil treasured and wanted everyone to share in his findings, his conclusions, and his endeavors. Now that I have that fresh in my memory I can explore Phil's own work and his deepest feelings in his poetry. My entire career has been filled with the editing of technical documents trying to keep our naval civilians healthy as they go about the very hazardous work on a nuclear submarine. Now, I get to read about what Phil has experienced. Phil has journeyed far and wide and read so much more than I; I now learn from Phil. The collecion of works he has compiled and shared have opened my eyes and caused me to want to read more than ever before in my life. Now with 'The Blue Museum" I finally begin to understand Phil Cousineau. I have only begun and already I feel glad that I just read the 'soul' books first with their depth and breath. And now Phil expresses to me his 'insides'. I just bought a phone for my firlfriend, the salesman choose a blue camera for me. Here in Hawaii I have seen how blue things can be like when I ride into work and can the pacifac all around me. All the places Phil has been, the way he sees blue in everything makes we remember scuba diving, painting, traveling and experiencing various people, places and thoughts. I will need to read this book all over again after I have read all his other books he has sent and I have bought. I will take his thoughts with me as I travel and will now 'see' in a more 'blue' illuminated view.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews