Zhuangzhi (Chuang-Tzu) dreaming of being a butterfly
So, I was reading through some blogs today and found this:
For a long time, I've wondered how to write when the cognitive resources required have been already exhausted. Mostly I think it's an excuse: isn't this what real writers do all the time – work hard despite the damage it delivers? Think of Nietzsche and his headaches, Henry James and his tendinitis, the late Christopher Nolan. What ever the answer, the physical response is the same: the curtain sweeps down. (for a link to the article click here)
As the Proust seminar I have been taking at the UofT comes to a close, I cannot help but think of what the effects of exhaustion are not just on writing, but also on reading. Indeed, Proust is (has been) an exhausting read. But now, as ‘the curtain sweeps down’ on one of its significant venues, the reading is in one sense over: has my reading of Proust, then, been exhausted? Or is exhaustion just another form of reading, not an end but a beginning to a different framework for observation? The curtain typically marks the end of a performance, but what if the curtain itself has its performative (phenomenological) potentialities? I’m sure there is a lot to be explored here, with regards not only to exhaustion and reading, but also with regards to a re-evaluation of the meaning of ‘the end’.
Anyway, the writer of the blog continues:
I wonder if fatigue should be regarded as an obstacle. If work is the activity that shuts everything down, then can writing be done when it isn't work? Haven't I always found the most promising ideas arrive when I am farthest from purposeful thought: strolling along the seafront, sitting in silence waiting for a train, drifting off to sleep?
I thought to myself that 'this guy needs to mention Proust'. Then, I thought, why does everything come back to Proust?
I was watching an episode of Mad Men, the HBO series about ad executives in the 60s, and was struck by another Proustian moment. One of the characters, Paul Kinsley, is working late in his office trying desperately to come up with an idea for an ad campaign. He tries masturbation, whiskey, listening to jazz, but it's only when he gets up to go get (steal) an apple from the office fridge and runs into the custodian, Achilles, that it hits him. He stumbles over the fridge while Achilles is trying to tell him a story about his family, and suddenly ... "I've just come up with the idea for Western Union." How Proustian, I thought, it's like he just stumbled over some uneven cobblestones.
Is everything, after Proust, footnotes to Proust? How many have actually read Proust, and if they haven't, how is it that they are so Proustian? Maybe one day we will all wake up and find that, in fact, our real lives are just dreams, and that we are all really characters in Proust's Recherche. A disturbing thought, indeed.
In any case, the blog article has some other interesting things to say about tiredness and its effects on seeing -- the weary gaze, which 'wants nothing from' its object, reminded me of an earlier post by Eva-Lynn about an object of the gaze that is "not trying to be the object of fantasy". The gaze that 'wants nothing from' its object seems to be the inversion of this. Their material, turned inside or out, is sleep, fatigue. In any case, this renews my belief in the importance that the experience of tiredness, sleep, boredom, fatigue, has for Proust's (mostly bed-ridden) writing.
