boredom

it is interesting to think about boredom. Am i bored now? lost in the white space between words. No. To write about boredom is not to be boring. It’s to think about the concept. A moment of boredom is harder to describe than a fence. Whether philosophically or as Duras says… a continuous and ever present concept. From the particular boredom of childhood, to the boredom of bourgeious life: vague, listless, waiting on the very edge of possibility. Where time is as expansive as space and anything and nothing may pique your curiosity, or usually not. The kind of boredom in which sunny afternoons are eternal… (“save me save me from the squeeze, I got a big fat mamma trying to break me…” as the kinks sang in the summertime) When I try to recall the moments of boredom and aimlessness, (not so much of my hideous childhood, the brokenness of my father, schooling but…) I find vague memories hovering on the edge of memory, most obviously false, some actual memories, all out of context all out of control. Hence on a spring day, reading and failing to read in the sun through the window, the banal background sounds. In the summertime pollen and sand on the car. The ground drying in the heat. What is it about expansive space and time and summer? It’s like Lefebvre and everyday life, alienation and boredom go hand in hand. A couple of concepts dancing down the road together. Boredom is not seasonal, it can strike at anytime — when reading a book on Hegel, an overlong novel (100 pages in and 300–500 to go, just stop, what a boring narrative I think and close the book… As you know, almost always I am alone in these memories. As I enter my early to mid 70s , I find myself recalling these moments less. This is not nostalgia. It is something else. I think it has to do with time and space. My inherent nomadism needs to edit these memories that threaten to oppress me, refusing the boredom. though it’s unavoidable. Is this different from the other kinds of boredom? the boredom of “ordinary devotion” in Winnicott’s terms, who thought that if devotion was an important developmental step in the work of mothering, then a lack of devotion — the ability simply to provide care without feeling ruined — was also crucial. He has a theory about child development and transitional objects. They are sovereign to the child herself and vital to her development. They must never change, he writes, unless directed by the child. What a pathology. (Imagine the microfascism this produces.) The ordinary care is also boring. The act of caring for infants, repetitive, repetitive, repeating, lovely and yet boring boring boring. How boring this time is, how banal, how necessary. It’s Thursday (Week 17), it doesn’t matter which one really, a new shirt is delivered by a delivery driver called Andrew. (He has a badge), books are arriving via the post office, bought or returns? one is devoted, to the text, to the paper on which the words arrive. The book i am reading is boring, never getting to the point. When one is interested in writing about these everyday things, one fortunately becomes defined as that kind of writer. That’s not quite it. As others said in the meeting on boredom; my fear might be nonsensical. (Yes, we were discussing boredom.) You need: a structural analysis, an institutional analysis, everything is political including this, it says. I feel that I should reach for the Heissenbuttel poem which talks about boredom, restrain myself as I’m on a zoom call. Thinking about the ordinary and the daily boredoms . Being attentive to the slow. Noticing the everyday practice of boredom and and and then writing about them. That might be necessary. Lines of the segmentary, transparent and molecular. This kind of boredom, space and time. It is a line of flight across and towards the horizon. I find these subjects interesting in part because they fill my days. I began this thinking about boredom because I read a delightful text called Bluets in spring when early spring sunshine hit the ground. It was boring, t was interested in it as hypertext. I bought some Isabelle Eberhardt texts as a result. I went through my memories, my library, my archive and so on. So an archive of boredom exists here. And about how familiar the occasional look at the mass media is, let us support the latest genocide they say. So boring, more boring and tortuous than Schrodinger’s deterministic cat in a box. How familiar and how banal. Anything can be boring. Then there is Adorno who believed that: Boredom, marks a shift in social politics. Boredom is ideology. It is the oppositional relationship that has emerged in (free-market) capitalism. There is nothing free about time that is unfettered with demands. There is no time that is unfettered with demands. Asynthesis. ideology, assemblages and discourse — unseparable. Adorno had no understanding of the spectacle. The strange things Adorno believed. It’s not the snark but the terrifying boojum. I type this sentence with one finger waiting for the machine to hum…