There is a difference, and it could be a big one, between deciding (or even praying) to do nothing… and having nothing to do. For a start, in the first way of thinking we would like to suggest that we have a choice in the matter. The second way of thinking suggests we probably don’t.
I want to start from the second proposition – having nothing to do. Or is “having nothing better to do” more accurate, since maybe there is always also some value judgement involved? I think it is.
Because in reality there is always some small thing worth the effort of bothering with. Nothing dramatic, a necessity really, like clearing the throat before speaking, it is often as dull as that, and close to boredom the like of crossing a territory as vast as the pampas where we have been these last weeks and months, the dust being blown everywhere and making our throats dry, and a lassitude and an irritation around the edges of the eyes.
With an endless flatness underfoot, and a receding horizon in which the mountains in the distance never appear to be getting any closer. What am I trying to say? That the words always fail in our inevitable one-way movement from the transparent to the opaque, but it is better than irony, and please don’t underestimate the beauty or power of a creative system, the aesthetic.
Like during a visit to Leicester in 1968. It is before the coming of the city centre underpasses, bypass, and expressways, since I am (or was then) just too young for Paris, and for the revolution apparently breaking out there. Or for the lure of the East and Istanbul, which of course you and I only reached for the first time a few months after we began writing here five years ago. And growing up fast, but in 1968 still in the last moments of my boy-life and having nothing better to do in the city, and I am making the long walk along the pavements, and through the market where the Asian newcomers throng, and finding my own way to where I want to get to.
To the Comic Kiosk: (1) where words and pictures are exchanged (some of them inevitably for money), (2) ‘under an object that acts as a shadow, or shade-maker’ (sometimes it is very much worth looking into the source of words; kiosk – in Persian kušk), and (3) where the comic is harvested, amassed and collected at a face value that is better than the merely ironic.
In row upon row without end. For example, here is one from off the stack, a recent favourite of mine from the cover of Zombie Economics (“a chilling tale” (2010)) by John Quiggin:
In other words, and in case you have not realised yet, I am articulating an object within a philosophy of political action.