By Fraser Hibbitt for the Carl Kruse Blog
The pessimists’s pessimist would say from the get-go: “all you do is utterly irrelevant. Think on the world and your life within it. Goals – or, rather, illusions – lead you on. They are the shining city on the hill you glimpse every now and then as you trouble yourself along the undulating way. As you approach the city, enter the gates, your satisfaction soon turns to boredom – it is not shining when you are immersed in it. You may chase your pleasures here without being afraid, but even the gratification will be brief; becoming, becoming, and never able to sit still in being. Far better not to be born; the only consolation is to turn your thoughts away from worldy matters, retire into yourself and see reality as it is, break the ever un-erring cycle of boredom and want.”
I pick up a pencil and begin to sketch. Not very well, not very bad. There is a time when it becomes a bit of bore. But why should it be? I am not interested in doing anything with it – not even for myself. Apart from to pass the time, I hear someone say? No, no, this is enjoyment. Listen: I only begun to find it a bore when I had suddenly seen a flash of how one might draw, or when I had suddenly seen how an image might be from the chaos. It follows to try on the whim. The skill not being there troubles and virtually blocks the will to complete this idly-formed wish. I cannot get at the woman of my desire! Now I am dissatisfied…eventually, bored.
A failure it is. I was better off not thinking. I pick up a pencil again and do some shapes; it morphs now into a brick house, and the sun is a ball above it shooting off rays. Above the sun is a face licking the sun which licks the house. This is all crudely done, who cares? I’m happy with it. I didn’t imagine how I might do it, but just did. The pessimist gives me a laugh because they seem like a child, even if, like a child, they are undeniable in a way. Becoming and being? This is asking a lot. But a thinker cannot help themselves, nor can anyone who lives… insomnia and all these other moments that force a kind of awareness. The pain and toil. Without becoming religious, or what amounts to it, self-righteous, there must be something a pessimist has missed. These thoughts because I drew something without thinking?
Drawing is an utter irrelevancy to my life. When I do things, like drawing, that have no meaning to me, the pressure of the pessimist’s cycle seems to have lifted. And this is a lesson for caring. When painting bamboo trees, the Zen Buddhist effortlessly traces the branch without taxation of the mind. This act is no irrelevancy for them but they perform the task as though it were. Nothing of worth is easy, and training is the act of knowing how to let go, of becoming intuitive with your skill. So what is training in irrelevancy for, besides a humour of un-meaning and randomness? Some people may get that point very quickly, others, sadly, do not.
Now I can agree with these pessimists, but not by turning away from the world in solemn half-masked despair and haughtiness, but as a fool and idiot, for the time being. To really understand a pessimist, some biography helps; it can be said of spiritualists, too. When night draws in and you’re talking to someone and they proudly admit nothing has any meaning in a positive sense, it’s all pointless… you cannot help asking well how do you live with that hanging over your head? You know them and know they live like everyone else. So what point are they making? Do they only want to be right? People also say things like “I believe in something out there”, or “I’m not religious but science doesn’t go all the way” etc. etc. But none of these statements makes a difference to any way of living. It’s a whim, a flair of thought. I have more sympathy for the ‘something out there’; yes, yes, some Will, some Force, but I don’t really care. It’s completely irrelevant to me.
II
Inadvertently, or perhaps advertently, there have been some writers whose words of pessimistic dread cause fits of laughter. If this is all their words cause, I am sure they are turning in their graves, or twitching in front of the mirror. This is a major instrument of satire with its moral correctives through laughter, or at least the taking down of the target through humiliation, whether that is an authority or a personality. The pessimist finds satire an easy vein to write in because of their gloomy outlook. All they need do is compare the vanities, the falsities, the masks of the world with what they believe and the comparison could not be more startling, and funny. That is why satire is usually a tool for the pessimist; however, it is rarely no more than that; a whip to get the reader into shape. But sometimes their whole enterprise strikes the reader as funny.
Blaise Pascal worked on his Pensées for a specific reason: to show that life without God is wretched. He goes about this, firing off his barbs, and making the reader feel insecure and vain; speaking about humanity’s existence hanging in between inconstancy, boredom and anxiety; writes about the vanity and pomp of the world. Yet it doesn’t need to come off as a shock, instead it is strikingly hilarious. He talks about a gambler who if given his winnings without having the danger and anxiety of the bet would be so ruthlessly bored that he’d be forced to commit some other act of danger and anxiety; like Schopenhauer who writes about what a Utopia would do to humanity: drive him to such lengths of boredom that many would invent reasons to kill each other or commit suicide.
The people who realised the intense humour in all this have always been those of a more artistic bent. The humour found a full expression in the so-called ‘Theatre of the Absurd’: Samuel Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, Edward Albee, to name a few. For all the Absurd playwrights brought onto the stage, this was one of their greatest charms: humour in the irrelevancy of, not exactly life, but much of existence. The lesson of their success and respect in the history of theatre can be thought of in a similar way as understanding why its fine to do something irrelevant – some people get it very quickly. The famous example of Beckett’s Waiting For Godot being performed to prisoners at San Quentin prison and they howling with laughter is a striking case. Where some nose up-turned critics derisively called it a play where ‘nothing happens, twice’, the ‘uncultured’ men lavished the experience because they understood something more profound about meaningless waiting and all the random non-sensical things you do when you are bored.
And thus, Absurdism made its way into culture; you can find it littered here and there – in adverts, in music, in movies, as a device for expressing our inability to grasp reality while pretending that we do – let us hope that one does not become painfully self-conscious of this. The clash between the pretence and the inability is funny; it can be sad and draining that the show must go on, but with humour, for some reason, you are raised above it for however so long. If someone isn’t that familiar with this feeling, they are probably familiar with being stopped in their own thoughts and having a laugh at themselves for some ridiculous pretence or hard-boiled attitude. Like looking back on some youthful attitude. In fact, youth remains alive the longer it laughs; youth is a joke when it thinks it is what we call an adult; an adult is a joke when they forget that they are young.
III
Boredom! What a vague state to be in, tinged by dissatisfaction, in want of the will to do anything, and with an alarming regularity this feeling can crop up. Boredom seems so vague that it is almost innocent. “Oh, I’m only bored, I’m just bored”. Only, just, and the world of things, excitement, ambition, seem at an end! My passions are null. What a funny figure, collapsed somewhere on a sofa, staring at nothing, barely being able to rise and make themselves some food. But it happens. Sometimes in the most unlikely places; with other people, at the pub… at a show, in the gallery, anywhere. Wisdom will tell you that it is fine to be bored as you have been bored many times before and perhaps boredom is merely a sleeping of the will. You mistake your turning away for something it isn’t; it is backstepping to make a further leap.
That’s all very good. You will not be surprised to hear that psychoanalysts make much of boredom. I think it’s simply this: resting up of the will. A good lesson too. It shows that all worldly ambition and passion isn’t as hellbent important as you think. And perhaps you have taken it too seriously. So eat and walk without purpose for awhile. Boredom is where all kinds of outrageous thoughts originate; the most pessimistic images pop up in the mind and say: well, well, well; here we are again – didn’t I tell you? you would do well to remember the wisdom of the Hindus and the Buddhists, what do you think Nirvana is? And so on. What a seducer.
Boredom and the pessimist have created many works of genius, there is little doubt. They are laughed at but never really humiliated because despite the glibness of the witty comebacks, and the rest, life is very serious and the pessimist sees right to the core of our state. An undeniable kind of mind that we often do away with from sheer terror, or a lack of desire to deal with abysmal thoughts, or perhaps a lack of passion to dive. There is much good these pessimists bring up from their dives. It’s true, Schopenhauer considered it to be a sin to be born, but he also wrote: ‘thus for a race such as this no stage, no form of existence is suitable other than the one it already possesses.’ For some context, this is the concluding thought to his discussion on Utopia mentioned earlier. The point is: there is no one who brings you around to living better than a pessimist, unless you forget your laughter along the way (which they often do), because that would mean it is the tightrope walk unto death.
Optimistic folk and the self-betterers seem, to me, to bring about just as much, if not more, pain through their creating a false divide which intimates: being bored isn’t something you should feel; it is too ready to alienate us from ourselves. “Why am I not happy? Why can’t I have my desires? Is there something wrong with me? I wish I wasn’t…” of course not, no, no, it is all very human. You are alive as millions have been for the millions that are, and it’s like they’ve sat around feeling bored like you over the expansion of human history. Yes, the pessimist does not shy away from seeing life as a grand multiform strange thing breathing over millions of years. So much so that they get in over their head, neglecting the individual – the optimist is the individual who is ‘doing and promoting good’ for this brief sneeze in time. In the least, you say, there is no shame in feeling, even living, in the negative. To promote happiness, well-being, as the normal state is not only a grave error, but an insult, for how strong, intuitively stoic, humanity is to merely live… But we won’t think much about this anymore. I’m bored of it.
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The Carl Kruse Blog Homepage is at https://www.carlkruse.com
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Fraser include The Poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, A Look at Matsuo Basho, and On My Failure to Write Anything About the Music I Hear.Failure to Write .
Carl Kruse maintains an older blog at https://carlkruseofficial.wordpress.com/
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