1.
I’ve begun to wonder whether I’d grow too proud, becoming used to seeing souls being used by the system. In all things one either uses or is used – all systematic things. Love is the absence of any system. But in life, in career and consumption and capital, one is used to using and being used. So I use it: I use the system, counting all my expenditures to my benefit. I say of every dime spent ‘It is for my enjoyment’ – the wash, the gasoline, the bills, the beekeeping. Be a yeasayer. Affirm it all for some impersonal purpose, over and aside from profession, from home and family. Make use of the system in which one’s’elf is subject. It is better to use it for oneself than to avoid it altogether.
Indeed, I’ve become too proud. I write like Nietzsche, and if I get as good at making everything my own as he did, I’ll schiz over. I’ll become everyone everywhere from all times, and will be utterly unfit to use or be used – an uncarvable block, an unavoidable becoming-Daoist.
I do not want that. I merely wish to lose my way.
2.
The question is of course: where did all of this come from? The buildings, this train, the mass of students boarding now at Fordham station – what made them happen, what makes it happen again? What made Egypt, what made pyramids and sweatshops and hardcore porn? That is the question – given one has courage enough to confront it. It is not, in spite of Heidegger and Hamlet, about “being.” Nor is it in being “alienated” that the question comes to arise. No one “forgets” the question of being – no one falls into illusion or out from blessedness. The question is of becoming: what do we become? What is becoming for us, what do we find becoming in others, what do we expect of them, what do they expect of us, how do these expectations create a being that stifles becoming and what is its name and has it always been? Will it always be? And will we learn to become within it?
3.
Why do we do it?! Why do we crowd on to this train, push in a herd up these stairs, one step at a time, staring the person ahead of us in the back of the head? Why!? Because we love it!
4.
The world’s a game,
Save that the puppets pull at their own strings
Society is now one polished horde
Formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and the Bored (Lord Byron, Don Juan)
If, then, my thesis is true, a person needs only to ponder how corrupting boredom is for people, tempering his reflections more or less according to his desire to diminish or increase his impetus, and if he wants to press the speed of the motion to the highest point, almost with danger to the locomotive, he needs only to say to himself: Boredom is the root of all evil. (Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or)
‘I suppose you think I’m an awful fool, Bendrix, not to have guessed. Why didn’t she leave me?’
Had I got to instruct him about the character of his own wife? The poison was beginning to work in me again. I said, ‘You have a good safe income. You’re a habit she’s formed. You’re security…. Sometimes I thought you knew all about it and didn’t care. Sometimes I longed to have it out with you – like we are doing now when it’s too late. I wanted to tell you what I thought of you.’
‘What did you think?’
‘That you were her pimp. You pimped for me and you pimped for them, and now you are pimping for the latest one. The eternal pimp. Why don’t you get angry, Henry?’
‘I never knew.’
‘You pimped with your ignorance. You pimped by never learning how to make love with her, so she had to look elsewhere. You pimped by giving opportunities… You pimped by being a bore and a fool, so now somebody who isn’t a bore and a fool is playing about with her in Cedar Road.’ (Conversation between a cuckold and his wife’s adulterer in The End of the Affair, Graham Greene)
5.
Spiked with poison’s pride, I grow bored with society. Marriage, systemetized love, seem no longer sensible. Have we had done with being, with serving as security for one another? We are all of us living in our Other’s Shadow, and the mother we leave behind is dormant in the base of our spines. I reject it, this foolishness and boredom, this serfdom in ignorance, and am left with – the internet, the turntable. Is it true that we only ever interact with a projection of ourselves?
Too far, too fast! Dreams fly into the mists of dawn. Who am I to write this way? No one, nobody- and yet it seems it must be said: This is a matter of honest prurience. I am neither Nietzsche nor Rilke nor Rimbaud, I am closer to Malkmus-
woke up to people so tall to you
i can’t so i won’t stand
up chuck break luck
look for the splinters you might see where they come in
go down, sweet yardley
i won’t let you fall down, sweet yardley
i won’t let you fall down, here, now
ah – goddam the guts and the gore
nobody’s crying ’cause there’s no one to score for
come up sweet randy
i won’t let you fall – what you got to lose
what you got to prove?
who you gonna screw down here… now
here now.. i am.. here now ..i am… here… now…
your life is about to-to come
away from the mirror in a rainshed
generation
fight generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
stop right (Pavement)
7.
Rising out of bed, I soon look into the holy mirror and see: I am wholly myself, punctured and pored with a thousand tiny holes. Who performs the acupuncture? Who will take out the splinters? Pimped and prodded by bores, fools, bitches and fakes – who will take my picture?
Caught up in a being of becoming, becoming a machine, desiring to be becoming, to be coming, constantly coming, I watch the record spin. I spin madly, in ecstatic euphanasia, a ring around CocoRosie -
tiny Spirit in a k-hole
bloated like sog-gy cer-e-al
God will come and wash away
our tatoos and all the cocaine
and all of the aborted babies
will turn into little bambies
wounded river push along
searching for that desert song
and mozart’s requiem will play
on tiny speakers made of clay
tell my Mother that i love her
martin luther you’re an Angel
charming monkey saunter swagger
drunken donkey limbs disjointed
your chest is a petting zoo
mexican pony fucked up shoes
i dreamt one thousand basketball courts
nothing Holier than sports
dragonfly kiss your tail
precious Robot built so frail
universe of milk and ember
your hot kiss in mid december
what’s God name i can’t remember
through the crack eye lovely weather (CocoRosie)
8.
The thing that is latent in a phonograph record, the thing that is revealed when I press a button and turn on the machine – shouldn’t we call that ‘life’? Shall I insist, like the mandarins of China, that even life depends on a button which an unknown being can press? And you yourselves – how many times have you wondered about mankind’s destiny, or asked the old questions: ‘Whence are we going? Like the unheard music that lies latent in a phonograph record, where are we until God orders us to be born?’ Don’t you see that there is a parallelism between the destinies of men and images? (Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel)
9.
Wanting to be among neither the bores nor the bored, wanting neither to be a boar nor a board, on capital’s ark, phe embarks, a renegade rocket laughing over Calvary.
shallow people say oh no
because they think it’s contagious
more shallow people say oh yeah
because they think it’s a masterpiece (Animal Collective)
oh god (The Dodos)
11.
Instead of bemoaning how the progressive externalization of our mental capacities in “objective” instruments (from writing on paper to relying on a computer) deprives us of human potentials, one should focus on the liberating dimension of this externalization: the more our capacities are transposed onto external machines, the more we emerge as “pure” subjects, since this emptying equals the rise of substanceless subjectivity. It is only when we will be able to fully rely on “thinking machines” that we will be confronted with the void of subjectivity (Organs without Bodies: Deleuze, Slavoj Zizek)
Trying to unplug the thinking machine
that calls me I, and you you,
Missing what was written first
because it struck a core
I sit after a long first workday
during which I had to reflect
in between copies, in between making
binders, how strange and timely
it was that I would find those
words of Zizek
I wonder
What void
less what substance
shall come to exist
and is believing in things
enough
I sat in that swivel chair
having had my office introduction
and given the timesheets
and tax forms, wondered
to what I was becoming subject
and would I now be always surfing
in moments when bored
and bound to sit there
working or workless
mechanically clicking at the glare -
The day gets longer and longer,
I no longer wonder why.
But, Zizek says,
“What Deleuze calls ‘desiring machines’
concerns something wholly different
from the mechanical: the ‘becoming-
machine’.” And “The Deleuzian schizo,
on the other hand,
merrily identifies with this infinitely complex machine
which is our body: he experiences
this impersonal machine
as his highest assertion,
rejoicing in its constant tickling.”
Ah, deus ex machina…. very well…
I plug in.
12.
Trying to remember,
But my feelings can’t know for sure.
Try to reach out
But it’s gone…
Lucky stars in your eyes…
I am walking the cow…
I really don’t know how I came here…
I really don’t know why I’m stayin’ here…
Oh, Oh, Oh. I’m walking the cow…
Tried to point my finger,
But the wind keeps blowin’ me around
In circles…circles…
Lucky stars in your eyes…
I’m walking the cow…
I really don’t know what I have to fear…
I really don’t know why I have to care…
Oh, Oh, Oh. I’m walkin’ the cow…
Lucky stars in your eyes… (Daniel Johnston)
nails it, especially in the beginning. but I’ve been finding such joy and safety in boredom recently. It assures me that the time passing is mine alone, that sense of using and being used you were talking about, finds some escape from that. we have the parallel desire, i think, to be larger than self, to be outside of enveloping skin, but at this point too (lazy/young/bored/fleshy) to make the sacrifices necessary to make an attempt to achieve this.
Can i do nothing? must I clean up after myself?
July 25th, 2009 | #
Thanks for saying this, you materialized some of my own reservations about how this piece turned out, which need some mulling over. Got a bit excited about having three different quotes involving boredom and society, and tried to make the rest work out of that. There’s a good bit about ‘profound boredom,’ which you’ve now reminded me of, hiding in the third part of my thesis — compliments of Giorgio Agamben.
I’d appreciate any other comments.
July 25th, 2009 | #
Wow. Like I said in my comments to Jed on one of the pieces above, I’ve been really self involved for the past month and a half, and in my extreme self involvement, I never even got around to reading this piece before. I truly apologize for that. But, wow. It’s great. I’ll try to collect my thoughts, however incoherently:
I love what you say about love – “the absence of any system” – and about marriage, the systematization of love. How could it be sensible? Yet perhaps it is the safety of systematization, just as it is the safety of boredom, that makes it appealing. Well, that’s completely obvious, I suppose. I think Jed is right when he says that we have the desire to be larger than self, but that we are often too lazy/etc to attempt to achieve this. But I think that in love, that is what we do – attempt to be larger than the self. And it is true that this attempt requires effort/work. I don’t believe that we must only ever interact with projections of ourselves, but I believe that that is what ends up happening when we are not careful. And that comes back to the idea of using and being used, which is how love is often corrupted. I wish I had constructive criticism for you, but you cover so much ground here, I’m still forming my thoughts about much of it. If I come up with anything that I think might be of use to you, I’ll be sure to come back and write it down.
September 1st, 2009 | #