Nothing for nothing means nothing

The philosophy of nothing has found its way into my day. It’s Sunday and I should feel comfortable with nothing. Yet in doing the things I had planned for the day, I am crushed by how wasteful it all feels. It doesn’t help that each activity reminds me with spoken and printed words.
I think of one of the Taft kiddos, J, 13 female, who would get loud, letting you know when she was bored. Solutions. Checkers? No. Pool? No. Tell me a story, J. “There was this time me and my friend were climbing trees and she fell down. It was funny." Did you help her? "No.” This is not the exact story that was told to me, but it captures the spirit of the story. On that day, even the timeless, divine activity of storytelling resulted in a big fat nothing.

Nothing surrounds us every day, and we must crush it. Yet, maybe there are too many people “acting” to the point where they are destroying--this is an idea often posed. I have to keep finding ways to argue against it. What the pieces of art that I have been observing suggest is that it is sometimes noble to do nothing at all.

Richard Linklater’s “Slacker”

Slacker is the filmic Ulysses of “Austin, TX. This is consciously stated in the film when one guy throws a typewriter into the river while reading from Ulysses: “Listen, this is what Leopold says when he got fucked over (by a girl).” The homage is a bit of a tongue in cheek moment with drowning of writing instrument, but I feel the director sincerely loves this book or else he wouldn’t take stylistic choices from the book: its absurd , strange serendipitous moments, the talking to people on the streets, the ambitious scope of representing varieties of people in fragments.

Slacker is worth watching a few times, but dangerous to make yourself a disciple of the film. Its mission, the director says in the anniversary edition notebook, among many is to pose questions rather than answers by using characters without history. Without more than 10 minutes of screen time for each character, the viewer will give all his attention to the talk, the words, not the motives. If we are asked what we think of any of the characters, we would say they are all assholes.

Kant took his walks alone.

One man literally looks like death as he tells a couple university students with a camera that “all you workers out there, the commodities you produce are just another piece of your own death!”

Why is he not working?

I'm waiting for the true call.

What's the true call.

I'll know when I hear it!

Appropriately, and in synch with Linklater’s strict guidelines for casting, this man looks like the walking death with no job. But he is interesting to watch. Do we want to watch him forever? No.

The characters in Slacker are indeed characters. We listen to them talk. When I find real people like this in the past I have recoiled and have been intrigued. Part of it is passivity. I don’t know what I expect them, us to be doing.

The man billed as Dostoyevsky Wannabe sits in a coffee shop yakking at friends who don’t seem to care what he’s saying:

“Who’s ever written the great work about the immense effort required in order not to create? … the obsessiveness of the utterly passive … intensity without mastery…”

This man, like others in the film, make their slacking principled. Has the cult success of a film like this made Austin an unbearable place to be or The Athens of America? I don’t know. Or rather, how many Dostoyevsky wannabes can a city hold?

Hugo (also human inspiration for the Oklahoma town Hugo)

The drunks and hedonists of Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables” wax philosophical on their own indulgent living habits. Hugo is more of a moralist than Linklater, and his characters that wax on ennui and self indulgence are not portrayed in the text as artists in their own passive or exciting right.

Like Austin, Paris in 1832 is full of crazies who find principles while loafing, drinking and nibbling off the fat of the Paris land. Fringe societies are found inside and all around the luxuries of rich nations.

For one drunk, Grantaire, to drink is enough when revolutionaries are shedding blood in the beautiful June.

I criticize, but I don’t insult. I’m speaking here without malice and to ease my conscience. Receive, Father Eternal, the assurance of my distinguished respects. Oh! By all saints of Olympus and by all gods of Paradise, I wasn’t made to be a Parisian, that is to say, to ricochet forever, like a shuttlecock between two rackets, from the company of loafers to the company of rioters! I was made to be a Turk looking on all day long at Oriental hussies performing those exquisite Egyptian dances.

More wine drinking from a drunk wiseman who gets a lovely girl pregnant and leaves her to resume his lawyering. This is Tholomyes:

Down with wisdom! Forget all I’ve said. Let’s be neither prudes, nor prudent! I drink to joy; let’s be joyful. Let’s finish our course of study with folly and food. Indigestion and the Digest. The world is one big diamonds and I’m happy!

The all over the place points elsewhere in the rant contradict each other, and he uses none of his knowledge for noble deeds done by the likes of other characters in the novel who have the economic odds stacked against them. Like some of the Bud, Pacifico drinkers in Slacker, one could say that these two characters from Hugo’s world are wasting their intelligences.

That may be the biggest challenge that faces us: how to apply the knowledge we glean from others, school or elsewhere. We may be lucky if we find one application a year that contributes to the greater good. A film like Linklater's is good because it poses questions that most films don't give a shit about. It holds a window to you in hopes that you realize that you're own intelligence is unique and open, it could be wasted by your employer or you can own it and find avenues for independent expression (as Linklater and Hugo have) or you can search for….Well we are always searching aren’t we?

I think for Hugo what makes Paris great is that its young people are always so aware of their potential that they riot when they perceive society to be unjust, wasting their potential. Take the recent example of rioters. Kids were not getting jobs after college because old folks weren't leaving theirs. Their intellegences were being wasted, as they saw it and the young folks held protest in and around The Sorbonne.

Throw Hugo's freedom fighters in America and they will risk being strangled and pacified by internet and a pair of headphones, as I am right now. It's the 21st century, Thom Yorke is telling me.

There is this constant struggle of tone in the book between terrible and beautiful. It is beautiful to be a watchdog over society, and it is terrible when the group takes indignation way past the shoreline where unnecessary death is the result of the wave of protest. In which case Wannabe Dosteyfsky says, "I told you so!"

Paris is both those things, terrible and beautiful (as Yeats also said of Dublin, Ireland 1919). Riots are destructive, and little tragedies spurn from them, but they are the soul of Paris. And the people who so thrive to put ideas into action are beautiful in spirit. Some of these actions, Hugo says, have made Paris “The light of the world" (and certainly the American Revolution and the French Rev that the fighters in Hugos are nostalgic for are spiritual kin).

And it can be said that Slacker was the light of independent film in the early nineties, showing what young people could do with their energy, a camera and $20,000 bucks.

So how shall we find this balance? What are you going to do with your knowledge?