INDIFFERENCE

  The landscape, the roads, the sky, the air were all vivid but dense and watery. She seemed to be looking at them through dizzying aquarium glass or desert air. They were solid, damply weighted with vegetable nutriment. Everywhere she turned were respectable possibilities, roads that led from her current spot. And they changed as she turned, but remained the same. They continued to lack any great appeal. She did not anticipate them leading to any worthwhile destination. They seemed instead to lead to simply another spot, where another set of roads would confront her, equally respectable, equally vacuous, a network of points and lines, signifying nothing. She chose no possibility which might by force dragoon her into some exciting or dangerous service; nothing great would come of it. So then what? She was discontent, wondered what this meant, looked for more. But was it only because she needed practical sustenance, or the social status and respect that come from taking a path confidently and being able to talk about it, or conversely, wanted to avoid the disrespect and perceived contempt people have for those without such a destination?

            She wandered listlessly, stared at a particular spot, watched people, absorbed the buildings, but never very well: to absorb things well you needed a requisite level of interest, and she lacked that. The ideas that would render the landscape with guts that would enable its dissection, description, and revivification simply did not tint her vision. Her eyes were open, her vision absorbed, and yet the light came in only so far, and never mixed in that whirling calculation and integration with other information and goals that would render it truly her own. She simply was not willing, at some basic biological level effected by higher-level cognitive disbeliefs, to expend the metabolic energy to allow that to happen.

            For each hill she saw she anticipated the long and painful, thankless climb in advance, her reaching the summit, her disappointment with its yield, her eventual exhaustion. She decided she would rather husband her energy. She knew she might by climbing experience excitement, some temporary blood rush, some sweat, some flush of adrenaline. And yet she knew just as well that this would not touch her deeply, would not be substantial.

            Or, with the thought of relationships, they might be warmer and more emotional. Why then engage? The long hard slog through a heavily snowed-in road to nowhere was unappealing. Why leave the fire? Oh yes, the sailing ship was not meant to stay at port, and all…but neither was it meant to go where there was no real purpose in going.

            Wherever she was, whatever she was doing, she felt this satiety. And yet she was not content. She raised her hand in refusal to anything presented, and yet she was not content. She felt she ought to do something; standing around gaping in a stupor did not seem an adequate life, though, if she had to admit it, that thought may have been spoken by some long-ago absorbed puritan voice with which she would not agree if she really thought about it.

            And yet — what was the meaning of this boredom, of this lack of valuation of all choices, actions, or possibilities? Nothing worth the effort, all a plodding roll of the eyes which she could justifiably inflect with a barely-concealed contempt.

People were no solution. So many, including intimates, grew boring. Their sameness allowed for excessive irritation. Oh, she knew the canard that if one was bored one was boring. And maybe it was true. Nevertheless: she grew tired of the same conversations, activities and personality tics. She liked and loved her friends, but they were no great respite, no fountain of variation sufficiently dynamic. And strangers, she knew, were simply friends in advance. Or enemies. These arguments starting from different premises fell anyway to the same conclusion. New people were no solution.

            Strange, too that she had in some ways been more confident in high school than she was now. Now she had doubts; then she had simply forged through. She stood staring for a while without walking or otherwise moving much. It did not yield her the information she wanted.

            The refrigerator hummed. All the TV shows were watched up, or washed up. The books were read, and were all the same anyway. Danger was painful, but pain did not seem like a great source of significance. It was painful, that was all. After the pain, she would again be bored, only then after having suffered.

            She tried helping people, learning things, and so on. Nothing really caught her, fired her up, and lit a spark. Nothing seemed to promise very much for her anymore. Her capacity for self-delusion and the construction of illusion were battery drained. She could not credibly tell herself that things were going to be incredible, and all the mundane skills she could learn against an absence of that promise no longer seemed so important.

            Time itself seemed to drip. Strange that time moved slowly, and yet she did not want to take up any activity. She disliked the languorous state of non-doing she was in; it seemed unctuous and pointless. And yet she was in that oily position precisely because she considered all points, too, to be mundane and muted.

            Open the door, open the window, read the book, watch the television, go outside, talk to people, wander around. Get a job, do the filing, do the paperwork, make the phone call, see the team, see the problem, research the problem, mention the solutions, write them down. Negotiate the deal, write the contract and ink it. Go to the bar, drink with friends and celebrate. Get a relationship, kiss, hug, fuck, fight, make up. Have kids. Deal with the kids. Take them places, talk to them, and enjoy their company.

            Worship. Participate in rituals and community. Meet people and pray to god or gods or substitutes. Donate. Engage in complicated dance choreography, ancient singing and chanting, enjoying the art of religious sculpture with hidden erotic meanings. Supplicate and sometimes appear to be answered, but often not when you are in greatest need. Attempt to be religiously faithful, and so faithfully thrash in crises of faith.

            Wear tattoos. Goth it up, punk it up, get high, commit crime, travel, fuck strangers, be different, rebel. Vary it up, sail away, get on a plane, and get on a copter. Join the army, move around, wait a lot, get in firefights, drag people around, drag equipment around, report in, report out, do duties, escape them, be court martialled.

            Serve people. Nurse wounds and accompany the old, poor, grotesque, the ill willed and the ill minded. Bail out ocean with teaspoon. Build houses, travel. See cultures, just like old cultures, differences skin-deep. Talk to people in conversations as refreshing and superficial as carbonation.

            Get into prison, see people injured, fight people, and see the people die.

Write, read, paint, and sculpt. Fidget, fidget. The work just sits there. Fidget. Dance, produce, act, collaborate, sing, and play. And still. Light fades, sound dissipates, performances go on then drag on, and then go the way of lines drawn in water.

            Protest. Revolt. Politic. Join movement, lead movement, leave all movements, then join anti-movements, and repeat. Join the party then leave the party.

            Start business, create product, fail. Start. Fail again. Start, create service, and succeed moderately. Or succeed wildly. Distribute, get known, and endure the problems with partners, public, employees. Get rich, have hookers. Create more and be interviewed. Write memoir.

            Get hurt. Get ridiculed, tortured, horrified, scared, thrilled, excited, go through all phases of cycles of stress release hormones.

            Play sports. Compete. Excel. Get rich, famous, sexed. Get injured. Leave. Or play forever, tear an ACL, stop, start up again, stop again. Watch football, baseball, soccer, racing, curling, Olympics, the scandals, all on the TV.

            Get depressed, anxious, melancholy, austere, sublime.

            Self-mortify, come ascetic, fast, sleep less, pray more, chant more, meditate, keep silence.

            Learn. Cease to learn. Forget. Learn again, but worse, and again.

Research. Discover. Revel in applause. Run into barriers. Attempt to overcome them. Discover more. Fail to discover more. Realize every discovery reveals more to discover. Realize tedium of merely expanding horizons of ignorance.

            Charge the credit card, max out the credit card, shop, consume. Get full, get sick of consumption, die indebted, or not.

            Find new home. Buy new home. Renovate new home. Fill it with furniture, put in design, and add some knick-knacks.

            Find people, talk to people, talk to therapist, talk to friends, talk to support group, listen to problems, empathize, mention options, give opinion, give your story, mention your problems, thank for solutions, dismiss their solutions, do your own thing, regret it in advance, regret it in the past, make the same mistake. Or not.

            Hike. Explore nature. See the canyon. Touch the water. The fog is beautiful. The mind is calm, for the moment. Then the problems return.  They are exhausting. Rest at home. What was the point?

            Suicide seemed no solution, but that was too scary, too uncertain. And where could it lead, after all? Either all or nothingness. And if nothingness was it, then why was that better?

            Fear tinted things; the fear of reality, the fear of lack of money, of physical destruction, of respect. Fear kept the hamster jogging: fear and the desire to please, the desire for food, water, reward. Fear and desire. But when these for a moment ceased to be factors—what then?

            Walking through a plastic world, do roses merit attention? They rendered clear fractal complexity; at every level up or down they yielded new information. But still a rose was a rose, and just an object. As, it seemed, were people. Real communication seemed blocked; it was mere show.

            Blood pumped. Circulated. Lord created. All worked. Why? All would fall apart without that work. Why keep appearances? Dharma. Dharma? What’s dharma?

            She paced back and forth like a caged tiger, restless, relentlessly restless, yet was unlike that tiger in that she knew that out there was no better than in here, only more painful. She longed to long, desired to desire, but could see no fruitful object of it. Why ask for pain, wish for misfortune, to be teased, tortured, mauled, mutilated, or simply hauled off for a line of work, hard labor in the prison gulags of the world, finger tapping 16 hours a day for some paycheck with which to pay for the apartment and travel places to be bored and drink the day away?

            Depression. The word had come up before. She had thought about it. Did she need “treatment”? She was skeptical. Medicine or therapy. The first was ineffective except for the severely depressed. The latter was effective on more people, but she did not trust therapy. She had done it once, twice, and thrice. She did not sense her therapists knew more about life than she did. She did not trust their listening skills, their efficacy, that they had any special knowledge or relationship that they could apply. Not particularly helpful, not her cup of tea. Yet more important - she did not want to escape her boredom as easily as that.

            Run towards the problem, not away from it. That’s what Arnold Schwarzenegger always advised. And he should know. Yet she (not Arnold) was face to face with her ennui, her existential had-enough-of-it, and had-her-fill-of-it. How could she run any more toward it?

            She was a coiled, tense spring. In her was enormous, carefully collected and reserved potential energy. Yet its accumulation warred with another fact: that muscles that are not frequently used are inefficient, wasteful, and even purely impotent. All that energy may be for naught if the powerful tendons and ligature that would use and launch it lie atrophied, shrunken, puny, unable to engorge themselves with power-packed blood and direct their fissile energy at just the right moment and at the right speed and in the right direction and in coordination.

            World issues and debate sometime absorbed her, but more as a tic or compulsion than as an interest. She was drawn to those activities because they were so well practiced, and she had expert aim, particularly when sparring with the poorly informed. Yet ultimately it was like junk food. Empty and unsatisfying.

            And that was another cure: junk food. She had, in the past, eaten to cure her boredom, a temporary fix, but a fix nonetheless. Unfortunately, it was a fix that she worried would bloat her into a repulsive seal torso, and so she forced herself away.

            Was boredom really a kind of sleepiness? It shared some attributes with that state for her. The same state of unawareness, though in boredom with eyes open. The same state of somnolent bodily activity, drowsiness, lethargy, tinted glass dullness. Yet in boredom there was not the same consolation of dreaming, typically. She lacked enthusiasm, lacked fire, passion, spirit. She had occasional bouts of stomach gas, however.

            She was in a mental prison wondering when her sentence would be up. Yet she did not want out. She knew that route only led to another version of the same cell. She needed to be let radically out, but did not know what that could mean.

            She was paying full attention now to the Boredom God. What now?

            Food and sex were temporary cures, she knew, as were, to some extent, all other sensual pleasures: music, reading, massages, and so on. Yet when these were realized, upon thoughtful reflection, to be so highly transient in effect, the efforts made to obtain them dull. So they like all others were relegated to the scrap heap. And simply sitting, standing, walking in the desert became for her the alternative.

            For a flash, a sudden savage joy afflicted her in her doing, feeling, thinking nothing worth doing, feeling, or thinking. She seemed to sink and appreciate for a moment the leisure of the divine liege. There was indeed, from that standpoint, no reason at all to move. Simply sitting in silence in a featureless room: adequate. She could be the fixed point around which the universe moved.

            To busily bumble seemed suddenly human, all too human, all too driven, perpetually crazed. Lie back she could, and consider, consider nothing if all that came to mind was nothing. No needs to run anywhere, hide, and be different than what she spontaneously was. Thinking could harmonize with emotion.

            Boredom, she thought, might be a profound signal or indicator of something. Look deeper into me, it seemed to say.

            She restlessly visited web pages, commented on web forums and on a friend’s mailing list full of political discourse. She engaged in it guiltily, however, as she knew, when she thought about it, that this was simply scratching an itch that when scratched would simply stay the same or grow worse. It was a waste of time, an agitation, not a solution.

            For a while she simply sat, sometimes closing her eyes and observing the waking-dream images that had always come easily to her, sometimes keeping them open. Was this where meditation had been born — in boredom? Was this the English word for the Hindu “detachment” from the world — boredom? Was facing off with boredom the ultimate challenge that all monks had come to the monastery to overcome?

            She turned to a book, an excellent little novel, leafed through a sullen page or two, and then put it down. She was doing a disservice to her boredom. She could not abandon it yet. She had to sink deeper into its unctuous profundity, its sleepy milky depths of cream complexion. It was a mystery, and so it had to have a meaning. This decadent air of the kind in which an Egyptian hierophant might idle — it was not there for some silly evolutionary purpose, nor was it the ephemera thrown off by a chemical process. It was a middling glen in which she sat, in which she had been placed, for a reason: that she might dig, or perform some ritual, or consecrate some altar, or glance at the sky, or use of the electromagnetic properties of the place.

            She could evade her duty a hundred different ways. She could eat or drink or leave, travel, and so on. Instead she sat, and doodled. Maybe she should paint? No. Perhaps there were a hundred possible angles, and yet her key would fit the lock from only one.

            Perhaps it was her duty to patrol the borderland between external and internal perception. She, who with detachment may watch, may watch, police, advise, and spectate. Did she become cryptographer or philologist of life? Perhaps not.

            The world is a sandbox, she thought. There was no reason to act as if one needed to create a legacy; in fact, that was both impossible and irrelevant. Things didn’t exist beyond the moment, beyond a lifetime of moments. And yet, the mental landscape was itself an inner sandbox, a sandbox-within-a-sandbox (but perhaps it was the outer sandbox and the visible world the inner?). To explore this strange bland white asparagus garden would require more than just a tromping around the rest of the playground. It was like a quiet fish tank in some vacant bedroom, occasionally gurgling bubbles up through the oxygen vent.

            Carrots. Vegetables. Fruits. Chocolate. Ice cream. These were the fleshy implements she thought of as she looked out at the dreary air.

            She wanted to say more, but felt out of other options. She was exhausted while awake, exhausted with sleep, overfull of boredom and interest both. She could eat something tasty, and might soon, but was trying to forestall that process as long as possible. It too would lose its potency as soon as it was indulged.

            A pressure in her eyes and heaviness in her stomach, a lassitude in her arms, dimness in her vision, plagued her. She sat hard and the weight of gravity on her bones felt more earthbound than usual. Time ticked and ebbed away. And yet she could not persuade herself to get up — what for? To get to the very same position elsewhere?

            She sat and asked herself what this feeling meant, and how she could discern its significance. Her groggy waking state grew more intense, as if she had overslept well beyond her physiological tolerance, and sleep itself was painful. It was like watching an endless monotonous landscape, like being trapped at dinner alone when stuffed to the point of nausea, like watching a perpetual lecture whose main magic is to stop time and even run it in reverse.

            She was stuck in a cave with endless supplies of food and water and bathing materials, but nothing else. She could talk to humans, but not about anything she wanted to talk about. She could read books, access any media, but with the same results. Yet boredom was not really about a lack of significance, or an anticipated lack of significance or legacy. It was, very simply, about not acknowledging, she thought, what one’s nature is.

            She was in a glass jar in a room in a suburban household in the sunny afternoon, a room in which no one is currently.

            Was her boredom perhaps loneliness? She talked with people, and they animated her for a moment, but then she lapsed. They provided a mere momentary stimulus, a simply tiny electrical current or pulse that stood her hair on end for a second, but only that, and then left her, as the price, more depleted than she had started.

            The quiet. Her room was unnaturally quiet, and yet she had no particular desire to go and hear the noise, which after all, she felt, was simply a more dissatisfying modification of the quiet. The silence put on disguise and become disagreeable: that was sound.

            In a sphere where nothing was of particular interest, neither inward nor outward, and yet this feeling was interesting and sacred, what happened, and what should happen? In a mass morass, a brambling thick forest, fudgy pudding abounded. Swimming through this treacly molasses substance was the day’s goal.

            She waved and lolled like a white flower in the dizzy, breezy, rainy twilight.

            Boredom said there was no answer. And yet dissatisfaction remained. If those constituted two points, what third would form their apex?