On Procrastination

It is 8pm as I begin this post. I woke at around 4pm, just as my day's lectures were coming to a close (though I expect I would have awoken at this time even if I had attended). Since this time, I have lain supine, preserved in state like Kim il-Sung, decomposing with irritating slowness. Hours drift past, spent in a pleasing state of absolute inactivity, a great emulation of some Hellenic accidie, and I finally resolve to winch myself out of my pit.

This series of events - or rather, this series of no events - would be interpreted today as 'procrastination'. I have, by dint of my dazzling indolence, completed approximately 0% of the tasks assigned to me so far this year at university. Indeed, by rights I should make a start on catching up with my homework from primary school. A foul essay looms on the horizon of my mental calendar, and I have done impressively little to prepare myself. So impressively little that it might understandably be termed, 'shit all'. I am a matador, awaiting my adversary with staid resolution. It will come to me, and I will defeat it in a stretch of time which, if offered to me at first, I would publicly ridicule. Yet I refuse as much as possible to ascribe the toxic label of 'procrastination' to all this. I have instinctively disliked the word for a great stretch of time, but was never quite sure why. Then, at 6am this morning, before sleeping, I had a shuddering pang of an epiphany.

Type 'procrastination' in the search bar on Twitter and there will be thousands of recent mentions awaiting your perusal. This, to me, is quite saddening. As you scroll down, through the ocean of worthless text punctured by the emboldened studs of 'procrastination', a similar sense of despair might descend on you. It is not that people are lazy or leisurely - indeed, these attributes propound great nobility in their mute defiance - it is far worse.

It is this: today there is a sense of shame, a transgression attached to leisure. This is what is so iniquitous. The guilt evinced in this litany of self-loathing is there for all to see. This is all to say: enjoyment has become a sin. It is ignoble, debauched, hedonistic, and not socially beneficial in the way that toil is. Bertrand Russell discusses this in his incredible In Praise of Idleness, writing that:

Broadly speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd; one might as well maintain that keys are good, but keyholes are bad. Whatever merit there may be in the production of goods must be entirely derivative from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them. 

This is bad enough, but there is another, more sinister layer to be grafted onto this cake of turd: due to the odd but popular thought that work is Good and leisure is Bad, we have come to see leisure not as leisure, but as time which could be spent producing, or at least preparing to produce. In other words, the supposed moieties of work and leisure are both seen only in terms of work. We are so balefully conditioned that leisure cannot be enjoyed in its own right, rather it meekly hangs in the colossal shadow of toil. There is a secret anxiety that we are not working. This is the wishful sadism in 'procrastination', and its only beneficiary is the capitalist system. We are Rousseau's men who 'ran headlong to their chains', we are Goethe's men who 'have to work for the greater part of their lives in order to live, and the little freedom they have left frightens them to such an extent that they will stop at nothing to rid themselves of it'. We have been transformed into such feeble invertebrates that we weep at the superficial charity of our manacles. We are Winston Smith, who 'had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.' I have seen so many people talk of how they are procrastinating by watching television, or playing a video game - this is leisure! The entire scenario sickens me profoundly. The vicissitudinous anxiety, the sense of eternal persecution in this mode of thought is an ungovernable fetter on the human spirit, and must be shed if humankind is to rise to the summit its faculties demand.

So I sit in my room, voluntary zoo animal (without the free food), and I do not work. And I say, 'fuck you,' and the beast grinds on.

I Cannot Write

Writing has become more than writing to me - it has become some kind of medicine, sometimes a temporary catholicon, always an anodyne. This blog itself is testament to its continued efficacy, for I am certainly not writing in order to be read, keen though I am to impress the legions of Russian spam bots who take great care to imbibe my writing in the most sedulous fashion imaginable.

I was flicking through some essays by Sartre and naturally was interested by On Being a Writer, in which he makes the grand asseveration that writers write to create a world into which they fit; they write to alter the wicked reality. This, he claims, is what separates great writing from mere writing, and I am inclined to agree. I must quote it verbatim, because what he says is quite beautiful:

There is no storytelling gift: there is the need to virtually destroy the world because it seems impossible to live in it. There is no gift for words: there is the love for words, which is a need, an emptiness, a suffering, an uneasy attention one pays to them because they seem to hold the secret of life. Style is a cancer of language, a wound cultivated like the wounds of Spanish beggars.

This is all very negative - Sartre describes the need to write as some sort of void, a deficiency; not a gift, but almost the opposite - a virus, a corrosion. It is not even precisely what I suggested above - that writers must create a world more peaceable and conducive to their existence - it is that the real world must be destroyed. What can I say? I'm a sucker for sensible suggestions.

In states such as that in which I am suffocated at present, I cannot write anything of use at all, and become trapped in some grim panopticon of my own passive design. There is no escape from the savage reality of all things - the semblance of minutest sway in the world is swept up and replaced with a monolithic impotence. This, I can report, is not a pleasurable sensation, and yet it dogs my every movement. Even if I am writing, I am simultaneously lamenting the piece's stains of utter ineptitude. This is to say, that I am not destroying the world more comprehensively is itself a cause for lament. Yet even this is better than settling for the banality of an untempered world. All of this is not to say that I would declare myself a writer, for this would group me with the huge number of other deluded dabblers who believe their witterings make Shakespeare look like Christmas card platitudes. It is undeniable I have written, but so has everyone. What I do say is that I can sympathise with the need to destroy the world, to stash fleeting ideas away like stool samples, to collect words like stamps. The idea that I might not know the definition of a word is a real horror to me - it is as if my freedom of speech has been curtailed in some way. This is how the proletariat was silenced in 1984 - the dictionary was literally shortened. The idea is that that if you can't find the word to express a thought, you cannot support the thought for long, and certainly cannot share it. This is the ultimate in tyranny.

Moving on, part of the irony of art is that something so ostensibly productive can be so bluntly destructive. The solipsism and introspection incumbent on the artist requires an apathy to the world outside of the artistic conceit, which insouciance can only be interpreted as destructive. One necessarily destroys the parts of the world one does not assay. This kind of dedication reminds me of the interesting argument Slavoj Žižek briefly sets out to show the destructive nature of love:

Love, for me, is an extremely violent act. Love is not, “I love you all.” Love means I pick out something, and it’s, again, this structure of imbalance. Even if this something is just a small detail… a fragile individual person… I say, “I love you more than anything else.” In this quite formal sense, love is evil.

But back to writing. Of course anyone can sit and smash a keyboard for a bit, indeed I am doing it quite well at this very moment. This, to me, is not really the same as writing, however. There is no cathartic restitution, no real incentive but the avoidance of boredom, and the threat of boredom can justify even the most menial of activities. There is nothing greatly satisfying in depressing buttons (and indeed readers), though there is at least an occupative distraction, and a fleeting stupefaction at the consistency with which my fingers magically produce digital text. I will never understand technology, and this only adds to my sense of wonder at its operation. I do not subscribe to the Enlightenment, Dawkins-esque belief that everything must be fully understood in order to be enjoyed. My sentiments lie far more comfortably with the Romantic belief that not knowing, merely acknowledging the mute vastness of all things extrinsic, is far more salubrious to the human soul. If science did eventually explain all things, I cannot help but think that the human soul would experience, in that precise moment, its fatal blow. One gains far more enjoyment from not knowing how Derren Brown completes his tricks than we might if he were to reveal it all and we briefly admitted, 'Ah - that's clever,' and made our way about our lives. I do not reject the practical uses of science, but to say that all should be reduced to science, by all people, instinctively disgusts me in a way I cannot quite explain.

This all sounds absolutely histrionic and, frankly, bourgeois and megalomaniacal. I therefore thought it would make an excellent blog post. There's not a particular point to this odd heap of syntax, but why should there be? Is there a point in painting the walls in one's house? Is there a point in looking for points? Just a point.

A Panorama

The university in whose scholastic catacombs I am presently immured is remarkable only in its complete lack of remarkability.

Grey edifices, formed entirely of reconstituted Weetabix, stand in obese defiance where they please, blotting out the sky with their asbestos-ridden, carcinogenic vastness. Strange balconies stud their haunches like arrows, transforming the masses into insipid pagodas.

Below the concrete imperium, a small, artificial lake bubbles with the rasp of a faulty iron lung. A slightly manic woman stands nearby, eyeing the scene with impossible interest. Her bag is prised open open with a discomforting adroitness, signalling to all around that, were she so inclined, she could perform a similar strike upon a human head, opening it like a squashy clipboard. Out of this bag is conjured a limitless torrent of bread particles, which perforate the water like tiny howitzer blasts. Ducks then swarm, eager to unseat the explosive material before civilians are harmed. An immense clamour ensues as farinaceous artillery is scooped out of the battlefield and, quite valiantly, into the rapacious gullets of the bomb disposal unit, where it might be subjected to weapons testing and, ultimately, turdification. Within seconds the hubbub has dispersed and, much like Poe's Conqueror Worm, an enormous priapic fish vomits itself out of the water and, finding its launch unsuccessful, falls back to the earth, conflagrated in its own fishy juices as it reenters the atmosphere.

Ducks circle the perimeter of the water, in a fashion I imagine to be synecdochical of the border control of the nation as a whole. Acidic sunbeams tangle themselves in the threshold of reeds, fizzling as they sear the water, resolving in fugues of nacreous tendrils. 

Some quiet bird wobbles along. What the hell is that thing, a quail? It looks like an animated vegetable. But surely quails only exist in egg form, this is common knowledge. Perhaps this was a quail's egg which has been left out too long, in gross disregard of supermarket labelling. 

A man walks past the scene, entirely oblivious to its mania, buried in his cup of shit coffee. This man has never seen anything so fascinating as heated, mulchified coffee beans - he has found the meaning. This is it. This is his calling.

Above all this, a grotesque chimney broods over the entire landscape, a foul parody of the chimney of Willy Wonka's factory, grooming prospective students with promises of Scrumdiddlyumptious bars but, two years later, presenting only fudge-coated coprolites, exhumed from the nearby burial ground in the name of nutrition.

But now I am seized from my reverie, when I realise the small woman who stood so innocently mere minutes ago to my left has now vanished from all sight. The ducks hiss furiously, and I understand immediately that this woman has been returned to nature, stripped to the bone by the chimaerical creatures of the lake.

The ducks turn to me, mandibles snapping, expecting food. This fact, augmenting that of my lack of food, induced a fight or flight response in my brain. I had no chance of gentlemanly combat with these brutes, not least because half of them were juggling flick knives between their exquisite pennons (ducks can boast, I have found, an incredible plumage which they hide as best they can, and a remarkable stripe of aubergine paste beneath their wings). Therefore I ran, dear reader. Heroism is terribly overrated. 

Expensive as Chips

I have just finished the task of eating chips. This is a fact, and any attempt to prevaricate on the matter will I'm sure result in greater ramifications in the future. I should clarify to you the nature of these chips, however. These are chips of the potato, not the poker, variety, and they are certainly not of the computing variety. To eat computer chips would be dangerous, unsatisfying and counterproductive to man's technological development.

This fascinating twist in events began with the recognition that, having quite literally no food in my possession of any sort (I did consider gobbling down a batch of vitamin C pills, I must confess), I decided something must be done to placate the faint corrosion in my core. Impelled by the monopolistic market conditions obtaining in my immediate vicinity in the early hours of the morning, I decided to bite the bullet - though at the time I did not realise this metaphor would soon attain not only a figurative but a literal validity - and make my spindly way to the resident tub of grease.

The horror of which I speak is a kind of locomotive purveyor of any foodstuff - any foodstuff that is liable to cause premature heart failure, I should add. It sits, static and brooding, much like the trapdoor spider from which it takes its inspiration, cloaked in innocuous sheets of metal whilst secretly harbouring its invidious fare, which it hurls on passing drunkards in the pursuit of its capitalist ambitions.

OK - this is all unimportant, one might assume, because the food at such places is inexpensive. I thought so too, until I was forced, by my unhelpful inability to refrain from purchasing things once in a spider's nest, to spend two of my finest, British, fair and just pounds sterling on what can only be described as a Pandora's box of plant derivation. I was quizzed of an evening by a stern man as to whether I would prefer my chips to be salted and vinegared. I acceded to his kind offer - though little did I know it was an involuted masking procedure, designed to screen from my disgust the horrors of the shambles (to quote the immortal Shelley). Having sprayed this arachnidian admixture upon the polystyrene casket in which my culinary hopes were inhumed, he passed the time bomb to me and pocketed my two pound coin, the outer ring of which adopted, in that exchange, a halolike and transcendent quality. Much like a blacksmith pacifying the beauty of a throbbing brand, he submerged the weeping coin into the innermost recesses of his infernal attire, and an audible hiss of anguish erupted from the depths.

I shall now essay to assay the quality of these chips. Drowned in this sickly emiction, which to me was entirely redolent of Marmite and suppurating cheddar, sat an extremely dejected bunch of hollowed-out witchetty grubs (one of these, I found to my horror, was not properly emptied), looks of futility seared into their squashy aspects, as if to convey some immense disappointment at the fact that their lives amounted to this - the production of low-grade potato substitute. The taste was comparable, again, to that of Marmite and suppurating cheddar, and the texture brought a yielding decomposition to the party. I felt as if the demoniac figure from behind the counter had conferred on me the gift of cannibalism, and here I was snatching up little humans from a regrettably-hued allotment and grinding them between my terrific maws. I took great joy in shearing the starchy, foul integuments from their hosts and sanctioning the resident souls to the various rings of hell. 'Gluttony for you, my child! I hope you enjoy eternal privation!' I cry, cackling wildly and spilling the untried upon the floor of my burning chamber. 'I will deal with you later!' I gobble, convulsing in sheer joy. I am Minos, I have unquestionable power, I am sovereign in this realm.

Look, I have no problem with paying two pounds for some decent food. I have done so in the past, and I daresay I will venture to do so again. But two pounds for this necropolitan oddity? Two pounds? Two pounds?! I pay less than that at a proper shop, with legitimate costs to factor in. In stark contrast, what I was dealing with now was effectively a frying pan on wheels. Where are the overheads? Are furry rear-view mirror dice tax deductible? Was this the most inefficient business the world had ever seen? I wondered whether perhaps, in the bowels of one of the fryers, a highly-skilled cadre of ferrets, on generous salaries with free private health care, curated a collection of fast food memorabilia. Rudimentary spatulas, rusted pans and soiled aprons would lie preserved in state, depending from above in solid gold cages, like royal prisoners.

Lastly, I have spoken of the quality of these foul digits but I have left the subject of quantity unforgivably neglected. I can only say of the portion handed to me that it was the atom of the food world, the smallest possible division of anything such that it can remain edible to the human race. Luckily for me, I happen to have a laboratory-grade photon microscope in my room, and was able to locate my meal in under four hours, placing it neatly over two grateful taste buds.

I now sit here, all sullen and impecunious, gazing on the polystyrene, erstwhile host of those blasted things, and I am being fondled by the strange urge to lift the vessel to my face and devour it utterly. The scent is far more agreeable than that of the charge contained within, resembling only faintly that of rotting entrails. Let this be a great lesson - packaging is the future mode of sustenance! And it really is cheap as chips, unlike chips.

All Is Vanity, Saith the Preacher by Lord Byron

I.
Fame, wisdom, love, and power were mine,
And health and youth possess'd me;
My goblets blush'd from every vine,
And lovely forms caress'd me;
I sunn'd my heart in beauty's eyes,
And felt my soul grow tender:
All earth can give, or mortal prize,
Was mine of regal splendour.

II.
I strive to number o'er what days
Remembrance can discover,
Which all that life or earth displays
Would lure me to live over.
There rose no day, there roll'd no hour
Of pleasure unembitter'd;
And not a trapping deck'd my power
That gall'd not while it glitter'd.

III.
The serpent of the field, by art
And spells, is won from harming;
But that which coils around the heart,
Oh! who hath power of charming?
It will not list to wisdom's lore,
Nor music's voice can lure it;
But there it stings for evermore
The soul that must endure it.

Today is National Poetry Day, one of those arbitrary events which paradoxically engenders in the beholder a sense both of hope and futility. Hope because it is at least heartening that poetry has not been entirely forgotten, but overwhelmingly a sense of futility in that poetry's standing in the world necessitates such a ridiculous gesture to begin with. Where does one begin? It is like having a national day for roller skating, or digressing excessively, or eating cheese. It almost means nothing. Those who would roller skate if left to their own devices (we can assume roller skates to have a place among these devices) will roller skate regardless of the day, and those who do not will hardly take up the activity simply because of some misplaced allegiance to nominal, calendrical rubbish. The day would simply serve as some kind of generator of strife between those who roller skate and say, 'That's a nice idea,' and those who do not roller skate and say, 'That's not a nice idea.' I like to think humans are not so shallow as to be swayed by such nonsense, but perhaps I speak too highly of my fellow bipedal primates. 

I think I would be a little more sanguine were it not for the absolute conspicuity of the fact that poetry is dead. Like rock and roll, it simply is not made anymore. Of course there are people who brand themselves as poets, and I'm sure there are people who brand themselves as supporters of the rock and roll movement, but let us not pretend that this is anything more than a token gesture. These movements are impossible to wilfully resurrect, and I cannot imagine any sort of new Romantic age unless there was a colossal coincidence of talent. It would not occur because some children had seen the hashtag #NationalPoetryDay on Twitter. Certainly, it seems nobody has been much inspired, all tweets containing fragments of prose nonsense demarcated by that oh-so-poetic line break. Please. Modern poetry is to me indistinguishable from rap lyrics, and this is naturally a cause for great regret. There is nothing poetic in the anaemia of modern poetry. One can almost imagine the Muses sitting on Mount Parnassus, passing a joint and watching episodes of The Only Way is Essex in their onesies. 

But this poem! Shitting Norah! It is perhaps tragic and certainly conceited to say that Byron is one of the people with whom I most sympathise, but there you have it. I've just mocked the state of all modern poetry, my conceit is already exposed. But seriously, I cannot say whether Byron had some supernal knowledge of the human character, or whether he had some supernal knowledge of my character, for I can only speak for myself, but he had some supernal knowledge of something. Who can say that they have not at times experienced a feeling of futility, of persecution even? Byron seems to summarise these feelings in a way unlike any other, he has a way of speaking not to academic fustiness but to the soul; Will Self writes of Byron that: 'I've always found George Gordon (Lord Byron) to be the most proximate of those literary and historical figures whose towering eminence and temporal removal should, by rights, place them at a distance.' So perhaps it is not just me. I think this proximate quality to his work can be attributed to its overriding candour. 

The title of this poem seems to come from Ecclesiastes: 'Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.' This is doubly interesting because it is precisely Ecclesiastes and Byron that Bertrand Russell synthesises in a chapter on 'Byronic Unhappiness' in The Conquest of Happiness, and whilst he makes an elegant attempt I'm not sure he wholly mollifies my pessimism. That's probably quite bad, isn't it? One of the biggest geniuses of the past 100 years cannot inculcate some optimism in me. 

Anyway, that's all folks. I keep reciting the first four lines of the third stanza in my head over and over again at the moment - much like a pop song but without the brain expungement. I think this is one of the lost and unappreciated charms of poetry - it has great music. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining poetry's demise, for music is far more accessible now than in previous centuries. It is now possible for the unwashed masses to gain a similar effect through the far less forbidding medium of pop music. Just a thought.