Bored

 

Spirit enough to be bored — Whoever doesn’t have enough spirit to be able to find himself and his work boring is certainly not a spirit of the first rank, be it in the arts or sciences. A satirist who was, unusually, also a thinker, could add to this, taking a look at the world and history: God must not have had this spirit: he wanted to make and did make things, collectively, too interesting.” – Nietzsche, Human all too H.

I am unsure about the jab at God at the end of Nietzsche’s bit here,  but every writer knows the moment that comes upon him like negative inspiration, when he detaches and to find himself and his work boring. That’s the moment that Bely cuts his masterpiece, Petersburg, by a third; that may be the moment when Rimbaud said fuck it, although I am too little devil or angel to venture there into that affair. However, I’ve been pondering the economist’s version of happiness and their refusal to understand the intricate dance between repletion and boredom. Economists are so fucking weird because they combine the most sophisticated mathematical models with psychological insights that would shame a ten year old. It is all about not only licking a lollypop, but doing it forever and ever, and getting everybody’s lollypop to lick. It is a gross and unrealistic view of happiness that leaves out of the picture the mysteries of happiness  which supposedly found not only the normative aspect of the system, but the incentive structure inside it. I suspect economists are so enthusiastic about growth not so much because growth is a good in itself, but because it perpetually puts off the question: what is the system for? And, of course, even Marxist economists will edge out of the room once you start pondering the many dimensions of alienation. Economics is really not the dismal science, but the clubbish science – and in clubs, it doesn’t do to pose such questions. They are so easily answered by dinner, especially if dinner includes port.

Now, in my flaming youth, amongst me and my pals, boredom was our mark of Cain – it was the boredom generated by capitalism that we were against. We tended to be big supporters of the situationists, without really having a vast or even a tiny little knowledge of them more than they pissed people off, and the autonomen, because we loved the autonomen boldness, the kicking ass, the taking over of buildings people weren't using, the contempt for the Polizei. This sounded like the shit to us, even though we heard overtones of peasant hut nostalgia in some of the way these micro-utopias turned out, with the holding hands and weaving or something and nothing that actually, after a while, wasn’t… boring. We liked, instead, the via negativa, through pure abjection, following the downward path of Bataille. It was all  “we’re so pretty, oh so pretty” with a sneer.

However, although it was quite the enemy, boredom was never really an issue, an affair, an object of thought. It wasn’t until we began to take writing seriously, and tried to write fiction, that boredom became interesting as a test. Boredom, after all, is always there guarding the path of inquiry into meaning and purpose – it has sphinx like properties. I often feel that at the heart of bourgeois vacuity is all the ways that are constructed to avoid boredom’s riddle.