#Scurf155: Me? A good-for-nothing
Wanking on about being a pile of leftovers
Like any half-wit my worlds and words seem more limited under the vast European sky than ever before. There is a kind of a blocking that chokes the evanescence out of me. It might be my day job. A trance-like fugue that sounds like something from an alternate universe. A definite Aristotelian reversion.
The last time I stayed in pre-Brexit Europe was as a surly student, so the sense of being lost can be somewhat understood. There’s also this pervasive sense of ennui. In a post-Brexit, post-Covid, post-stability world where everything is so wobbly it juts in your face. I scribble words on my phone’s notes app as the sky so heavy, vehement yet reluctant dances in its Tuesday night fury outside.
Here, we talk so much about the world, our place in it and its reaction to our place. But very little we pay heed to all else around us except us. So much self and very little else. Time to wean one off the self, perhaps.
The more I think of it, the more it occurs to me that this world with all its varied malaises, can only point at one and one thing alone to hold responsibility for it all. An ill so grave and propulsive in its force, capitalism forced the world to its knees, much before Covid. We continue be in its thrall as we continue to suffer from effects of long-capitalism. Its chokehold on us only seeming to have tightened with the ages.
This makes me think more and more of the importance of “nothing”. A nothing that sat at the heart of my living at one point, especially when I was here last time. And a nothing that is so starkly absent now. In its place various f***ing condiments of living flit around.
How quickly we deduced in the last decade that doing nothing was a thing of shame! How soon we arrived at the conclusion that if one did nothing but read a novel or three in a week it would alter the DNA of their being FOR THE WORSE! I had only ever heard the opposite of this till I made my way into life as an independent person. That reading and thinking were interconnected. And that those were obviously good things.
But now we were in a world where thinking is thought of as detrimental to use of time and even mind space. What if we monetise thinking, though? Each time a new thought comes to your mind, a couple of crunchy green bills produce themselves out of the ether. Maybe that will help change the narrative (I HATE THIS WORD WITH ALL MY GALL)?
This takes me to a dialogue from Sally Rooney’s Normal People (which I am never not reading and thinking about). While on vacation in Italy, Connell says to Marianne:
“That's money, the substance that makes the world real. There's something so corrupt and sexy about it.”
This is an observation that happens on the sides of Connell’s life where at some points he is just desperate to merely make ends meet while trying to find his way through university. The beauty of the novel, and of this sentence lies not in its reading of love, language and communication, but in its meditation on class divides that run so steeply in our lives.
Access to museums, Italian gelatos, fresh produce, cycling trips along the countryside, speaking in a foreign tongue while living in a faraway country — these were things once out of Connell’s imagination, but a scholarship made them all feel concrete. A small town, working class, hardworking boy who dreamt of writing, reading and working in those fields as a career is rewarded with something close to his hopes.
For every Connell who is able to meet or rather shape his destiny, there are hundreds of others we don’t read of in novels. The ones who came this close, the ones who didn’t even try because they were born resigned, the ones reduced to being good-for-nothings. This then makes me wonder about the pertinence of being a “good-for-nothing” in today’s economy, age and time.
How and why do we measure them? On what scale? In an increasingly dark, sad world who are these seemingly uncaring beacons of hope. This thought hadn’t even occurred to me till last week until I saw a little, innocuous question posited at me in the form of a cue-card at the Goethe museum.
Ever since I came across this, the thought has been circling in my mind. Little dervish of a thought, I’d say. Who are these good-for-nothings and who are the people who named them so? What authority does a capitalism-whinged society have on people who maybe know better than the rest of the race how to suture their time on this planet! The rest of it is an ongoing (perhaps even unhealthy, sad-angry) debate one continues to have with oneself.
Waking up at 4am not to have a drink of water, but to stare at the clear sky and think of the cadences of the homebound planes crisscrossing through it. What does a good-for-nothing do in a time and climate like today’s? A musing as diabolical as that feels nothing but a temporal glitch. Let’s fix that with an affogato!
