IT’S BORING

By Samuel Te Kani

Writing and doodling share a wavelength. What I mean here is that both require a certain critical listening, an adherence to a certain kind of silence—or maybe, a certain way of being and staying in silence, the patience to wait out initial vacuums of seeming inaction. Because ideas, like nocturnal creatures, have a maddening shyness to get over before they come to you. They have to be coaxed, convinced you’re serious enough about them before committing themselves to your station. All you can do is create the conditions and hope for the best. In this there’s something sculptural, like the gradual excavation of forms from an amorphous media—literally time, if we’re talking about the unspeakably private moment of creative inception. This immediately places a connoisseurship of creators and discerning audiences in a monied echelon, for time being the thing afforded those with the luxury of unhurried leisure. Our modern society is the enemy of leisure. Every silence has to be filled and refilled, every blank space developed and demolished and developed again in a berserker ballet of sound and image. In this hyper-mediated whirligig our facts and fictions, our fantasies and histories cross and drift into a single homunculus with the shared purpose of deafening eye-scorching diversion. If that fails, distraction will do. Sometimes distraction is even preferable; minimal engagement, not quite boredom, a maddening inch shy from actual stimulation. The attention-deficit equivalent of a Higgs-field (the barest possible something in a lab-simulated vat of nothing).

Cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek cheerleads boredom for being a precursor to disruptive breaks with chains of automated behaviour, a cheat-code for quitting the superego injunctions otherwise crowding freewill with consumerist orgies of sense and furious (pointless) activity. His metaphors describing this situation are often played as riddles, word games around the inherent paradox of preferring coffee without milk to coffee without cream, alleging to expose the limp decaffeination of modern life and the induced somnambulism of too much (worthless) buyer choice. In his opinion, boredom precedes disobedience from that unspoken directive to enjoy; a directive we naturally police in ourselves and others. Failure to do so, or to at least front the rituals of enjoyment with reluctant participation, is a pathological anti-social symptom. To refuse prescribed pleasures is misanthropic, is anti-life, is evidence of neurodivergence—for which we have enough cushy pills and rhetoric now, enough to enclose even the rejection of enjoyment inside enjoyment’s shapeshifting and frequently masochistic edicts. Because as any Christian can tell you, abject or neurotic suffering can be coded as socially-responsible enjoyment (just ask the son of god).

If the writer-doodler’s blank page gets filled as a reflexive response to boredom’s approach, then boredom is a liberator of higher forms—making doodling a mechanism of capture of more lateral (base?) thinking. It’s only between conscious projects (or even between thoughts) freed from the bolshie duress of intention, that the doodler’s lavish palette can be accessed; that a séance of preternatural messages can be staged and suitably deciphered. The pen is only loosely held in these ritual (and necessarily unplanned) harvests of ether, moving across the page like the skittish planchette skates from yes to no on a Ouija board. We perhaps associate childhood with an innocence not moral but figurative, in being closer to this appealing state of formless exploration which adult life leaves little room for. That childhood, free of obligation (and identity) is intimate with the doodler’s mode by default, ready to embrace every notion and image without the utilitarian valuations of maturity, without concepts of good/bad right/wrong high/low. Or perhaps, without these concepts yet being so baked in. The whole social order with its oppressive rungs of meaning does not impress a child. They have no fealty to it. It is boring.

It's in the potentially anti-social annexation of boredom, then, that a little psychic freedom can be retained. If one wants the pleasure of doodling in full, replete with fruitful silence and the liberating negativities of non-action, some skill in elliptically excusing yourself from life’s odiously stacked demands is required. You don’t have to disappear completely. But a smidge of Marie Kondo style trimming helps. Basically, you want to get yourself down to one or two social engagements a month, then zero. If you can scrap your job this works like gangbusters, but for those without the inherited wealth which otherwise makes a career in the creative industries possible, alienating your friends and family into leaving you alone works just fine. When you’ve secured enough quiet there’s the matter of training yourself to coexist comfortably with your boredom, unfortunately accompanied more often than not with anxiety—which also needs to be trained, like your friends and family, to leave you alone. Then and only then can you freefall through the humid ecologies of your own mind, unencumbered by anything besides the steady river of stuff you’ve accumulated since birth. Maybe unsurprisingly, the stuff of bored minds tends to the erotic (the life of the committed writer/doodler is filled with masturbation).