Break.up

by Joanna Walsh

  No, that’s too much like something you would have said, and I am nothing to do with you any more.

  I have nothing to do with you any more.

  What would I do with you anyway? I can’t think of anything I could do with you. The thought of you is boring. I never thought you could have bored me.

  To be bored with someone is the start of rejection. Before he dumped her, André Breton wrote that Nadja began to occupy his company, without… the slightest concession to my own boredom. They were in a café, which is a place people wait for one another and also a place people wait with each other: a place made for waiting. We met in cafés, sometimes. And how I must have bored you! The more you talked, the less I spoke, but not Nadja. She bored Breton by a repetitious performance of her own abjection: stories of the men she slept with (he assumed, for money), of her moments of breakdown, exhibitions of pettiness, small vulgarities. Nadja bored Breton because she resembled too closely the places of her life: the dreary streets, the enclosed train carriages of her Paris. She bored him because she could not, her mind could not, choose to leave those streets. And Breton was, he writes, grateful because boredom evoked disgust, broke his attachment. Boredom is close to disgust and, like it, is so physical as to prompt a prompt withdrawal, an eye-watering yawn. As for us, your words became an object that sat between us, pushed us apart: a pair of dirty gloves peeled seamy-side out on the café table, a reason for leaving. As you got bored with me, whatever bored you about me stuck to you and as we separated it peeled from us both until there it lay. And you took it for my life. Perhaps even I mistook it, for a while, for something alive because of the attention you paid it – but it was the dead shell of boredom.

  Breton and Nadja are the lovers who convert everything that we have experienced on mournful railway journeys (railways are beginning to age), on Godforsaken Sunday afternoons in the proletarian quarters of the great cities, in the first glance through the rain-blurred window of a new apartment, into revolutionary experience, if not action.

  Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

  I don’t know what there can have been, at that moment, so terribly, so marvellously decisive for me in the thought of that glove leaving that hand forever.

  Breton, Nadja

  Whatever it was, that rejected spare part, like Breton you thought the woman across the table would not survive without it, or without the contact that created it. Nadja, says Breton, seemed to live only by my presence without paying the slightest attention to my words. What Breton didn’t notice is that Nadja was also clearly bored, that they both sustained only the illusion of connection. And, as for me, I was ashamed to find that you bored me, didn’t want to let it show. When boredom occurs between companions it hovers like shame, never settling, reflecting now on the boring, now on the bored. Where to lay the blame? Boring is bored’s flipside, bored with is the twinned reverse of bored by (that parental cry – how I believed it – Only the boring are bored!).

  Characteristics such as ‘boring’ therefore belong to the object and yet are taken from the subject.

  Heidegger, ibid

  The two women have gone and the breakfast room’s empty now. What shall I do? I don’t know… I ignore the spongey white bread at the buffet and finish my coffee, then I walk out of the hostel, down the broken boulevard, over the lion bridge and into Sofia.

  •••

  The road that runs from the river ends at the central market, housed in a large hall. In the outdoor market the stalls that sell cheese do not sell yoghurt, but the stalls that sell yoghurt sell some cheese, and also margarine or cheese spread: the coffee stalls sell some chocolate: the chocolate stalls do not sell coffee but do sell powdered soup and sometimes tinned food. The system is the same in the indoor market, which does not offer anything more, or anything else, just repeated goods sold over a clean tiled floor instead of broken tarmac.

  I’ve reached the last page of my Italian notebook which, in Sofia, looks more and more of an outlandish luxury. I see no stationery shops, and the bookshops outside the market – of which there are many – do not sell stationery. In the outdoor book market I linger over the stalls although I cannot read the books. I cannot find my pen. I can neither read nor write. I am at my most helpless.

  If I could ask someone, where..? but my free map of Sofia suggests inflexible phrases that would elicit answers too complex for a novice speaker to understand: How do I get to the airport, What time is the next train to…, Where am I? There is no please, no thank you, no beer/wine/coffee; no big/small, no one-two-three, no how much?

  I’m no longer thinking about you. I’ve given myself another task: I’m in pursuit of a new notebook, an ordinary task which is the opposite of desire. I want to resist. I want to live extraordinarily. The more I pursue you the more you draw back and the more extraordinary you become, but if I stop pursuing, leave too much of a gap – of time, of place – you become first ordinary, and then boring. I do not like to be bored, finding boredom a fault in me. How can I restore your extraordinariness, my desire? Perhaps by forcing myself to be less bored, to pay more attention. To what? I don’t know. I can start only with everything.

  She was sucked back into the whirlwind of ordinary life continuing around her and eager to force her, among other concessions, to eat, to sleep. Breton, ibid

  OK:

  Everywhere in Sofia, there are few traffic lights but always the drivers are courteous to pedestrians. The pace of everything is measured. Streets that seem narrow take an age to cross, as everything happens in strict order. Everywhere here the WiFi is very good and usually free, but there’s so little online about Sofia that I cannot find anything to interest me about the city. That’s the boredom gap: if a place doesn’t meet with its written description, either the city or the internet becomes a restless tedium, and I might as well be elsewhere. Every city has an elsewhere, a place it aspires to. Sofia – finding itself uninteresting – looks for an elsewhere in Italy, its upmarket shops named, hopefully, Italia, and Vinoteca.

  If naming marks desire: the bigger the gap between the name and its object, the greater the leap of desire that marks their coupling. And, when the name meets its unlikely object, there’s a moment of delight, a bit like ritual time. Perhaps this is why I want to know little about my destinations – too much knowledge can blunt these chemical reactions – but, knowing nothing of Sofia I’m already bored here. How can I be bored when I have never seen this place before? Is it because the city is bored with itself? The McDonald’s on the main shopping street is empty. Homeless rifle dumpsters but so slowly, so leisurely, that poverty might be a pastime. Sofia is flat, built in a shallow basin surrounded by mountains lying at enough distance to be picturesque, but not beautiful. Unlike Nice, Athens, Rome, Paris there is no high ground, no point of view. The city’s streets issue no challenges. I can’t imagine where to go next.

  I search for a toilet and find one in the only luxury department store, in reality a badly lit barn with ill-stocked concessions, no sales clerks standing by the tills. A sign on the door indicates, in pictures, no dogs, no ice cream. But there are none to be seen. As I exit, three military helicopters fly slowly over, one suspending a large Bulgarian flag. Above them, a lazy tourist plane crosses the city to the airport.

  What makes Sofia boring is time’s abandon. A city bored by its own history, Sofia’s waiting for something that hasn’t happened yet, so that here and now are telescoped into nowhere. By the traffic lights workers are sorting cobbles to mend the road; a little further along, a man replaces bricks in a wall, choosing carefully from a pile to be reused. It’s the opposite of Rome, an anti-ruin, both an ex and a potential city. Builders are everywhere, not building but restoring: outside my hotel, outside the public buildings. The streets are wide, the facades monumental, but empty. The population barely fills the city. In the park fitness stations await workout freaks, but are used only by children. Sofia is waiting for a larger population, more up-to-date, more suited to its scale. It is wai
ting to be populated by giants. In the meantime the city is overstaffed with menders and cleaners making ready, picking up litter, maintaining the highways, polishing the floors in the metro, preparing for the day the new Bulgarians will arrive.

  •••

  I wait (or I am bored, or at any rate I sit) in a park full of lilacs and irises. There is a playground with bronze statues, fancifully conceived according to the myths that boys will play with girls, and that all ages of children will play together. I have never been so happy or so lonely. I am happy because I no longer miss you, and I am lonely because I miss no one. What I miss is desire. If I’m bored I can’t feel desire, as desire is never boring, it unfolds one fascinating petal after another. When desire stops, boredom flows in and creates a gap, with hardly a gap between.

  What would the lover ask of time?

  Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

  If boredom is a nudge to pay attention, I must work at new ways to wait, to skip the gap. The bored are always waiting, waiting for boredom to end, unable to make the leap because – language-less as I am in Sofia – they are unable to say why they are bored, to name a cause which could lay the ground for a solution. Boredom recedes an object’s capacity to mean anything, or the object recedes from its name – there is a peeling off anyway – until boredom yawns in the gap between, and nothing has anything to do with anything else.

  Boredom is a function of attention.

  Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh

  But a lover, waiting, is always charmed: desire fills the gap, self-inflates until it’s as outsize and as pregnant as Sofia’s department store, creating the opening of ritual time via love. I remember the moments before each time I saw you – the countdown in train carriages, in empty bars, in bookshops – in hallucinogenic detail: each coat-stand, picture, drinking glass, each page of each book, each phrase half-caught from the next table – more clearly than I remember our meetings which plunged experience into something like drunkenness. Often you made me wait, and the wait was as much a hallucinogen as any drug I could have taken to give boredom the slip. Euros/pounds/dollars in my hand: any trip’s framed by the time spent waiting for the drug to kick in. The wait, the wait, the wait is the kick.

  Independent of what happens, and what does not happen, the wait itself is magnificent. Breton, Mad Love

  Where should I wait for you now? Not by the telephone, as Breton did, not any longer. My phone travels and waits with me. Should I go to a bar, a café, for the WiFi? Perhaps, but if I’m waiting online, any scene may substitute, the setting just as abstract as a message from a lover who never appears in the flesh. There is no ritual, never any kick. In hell – perhaps also in heaven – no one waits: everything has happened already, and everyone is bored. There is no time, so there is no gap and, to fill it, there is no desire, and there is no hope.

  In the park in Sofia it is school lunchtime but the children aren’t playing games. Pairs of teenagers snog on the benches. One girl is draped over her boy’s knee. She looks boneless, helpless, physically, or mentally, ill, while he hangs over her, administering mouth-to-mouth. His posture says pity – pietà – until, suddenly, she shifts, stiffens and by turn he looks vulnerable, flopped over her, stringless.

  In between the lovers there are other figures: statues, but not the old Communist statues – they’ve been moved to a park outside town. The new statues look like they might be Communist statues, although they are not, because they are often in groups, rising in waves for or against something or other, because they are vaguely female, draped in abstraction and long flowing garments, because they gesture dramatically. They are named for huge emotions but their features are smudged and all the same. Some of them are cement, but they say nothing concrete. Their huge gestures tell me only that they’re big, and their names – JOY, HOPE, FRIENDSHIP – are never made flesh. Named hopefully – the children of an anti-revolution, of a country trying to detach from its own history – the statues’ handles come off in your hand. Perhaps they were once named otherwise, their original names erased like the faces in Stalin’s photo album. Boredom is what doesn’t happen between a thing and its name.

  Our names are not our own. Our names are social.

  Denise Riley, Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect

  Giving a child its first name is a small violence.

  Riley, ibid

  The Bulgarians could have destroyed the Soviet statues. Some states did. Boredom, the opposite of revolution, of ritual time, is not the opposite of violence (more parental voice: Vandals! Hooligans! They did it because they were bored!).

  I don’t know why I was so angry with you – you, in an email, after a tedious evening of quarrelling, waiting, together (for what?). (I don’t know why I was so bored with you.)

  This being detained alongside particular beings that refuse themselves.

  Heidegger, ibid

  Yes, boredom is a dom: a king-dom, a domain, an area of power – of power within a state, or power between two people. It is visited on the powerless, in politics, and in love. The bored and the boring are the waiter and the waited-for. The bored can do nothing until the beloved arrives, and the power relation they create is so physical it’s almost a space where the waiting lover is trapped. To make someone wait – to bore someone – is to claim power over them, but to be bored, to find someone boring, is also a power relation.

  When we make it into an object in this way then we refuse it precisely the role it is supposed to have in keeping with the most proper intention of our questioning. We refuse it the possibility of unfolding its essence as such, as the boredom in which we are bored, so that we may thereby experience its essence.

  Heidegger, ibid

  I wanted to deny that you bored me, priggishly believing the grown-ups: that to find someone boring would be a failure of my own imagination. But those evenings drinking when you repeated your piggish truisms to the point of hysteria, I, refusing to take the bait, did my best to bore you back. Did you bore me on purpose, to pass the buck of rejection? Did I choose boredom as an expression of my own violence? Or were we both just killing time, as we had time to kill, and no one else to kill in it?

  One sees the ageing Don Juan blame the state of things, never himself, for his own satiety. It is ultimately a choice between two evils – between still and bustling boredom. This is the sole choice left to him. Finally, he realises the fatal truth and admits it to himself, after which the only pleasure he has left is imposing his will on others, of doing evil for the sake of evil.

  Stendhal, On Love

  You’re fragmented, you said. The bored pick apart their objects, searching for a little meaning, until they appear only broken and rotten: that’s where disgust leaks in. Disgusted by you myself, I let you become bored by me, until I looked no use to either of us.

  I have been your Echo, your mirror. A mirror never says it’s bored, not with the dreariest corner, reflecting on cobwebs and faded wall-paper. Perhaps no mirror is. But a smashed mirror reflects only fragments. Break me and you break yourself, and anyone might be angry to see himself look back in pieces. ‘Who,’ you said, poking around my remnants, ‘do you think you are anyway?’ It was hardly a question (can these bones live?), and at the moment you said it I could think of nothing. So you gave me the lie: ‘You’re nothing. I bet you’d sleep with anyone.’ I examined myself and found neither of these things was true, and, for a moment, I was free. Still, there’s no getting away from you. If I refuse to be what you say, I still have to be what you don’t. Even now your boredom with me creates a negative image of its own negative self. And every time I’m bored by your circling memory, I think about what you were to me and – another double negative – I am interested again. You interest me because I allowed myself more freedom with you than with anyone else. However much we bored each other, when I was with you I never bored myself.

  But the wider the gap between us, the more difficult it becomes to hold you together, and the more p
ainstaking the process of curating your strung-out words into some sort of coherence that could still be loved. As you write less often, the gaps between your words have become so wide that you’ve begun to fall apart and, as you do, I’m frightened that I might too.

  In becoming bored by something we are precisely still held fast by that which is boring, we do not yet let it go, or we are compelled by it, bound to it for whatever reason, even though we have previously freely given ourselves over to it.

  Heidegger, ibid

  I’m still pasting over your cracks with the residue of what I still seem to be able to call love. I could paper all over you – your eyes, your mouth. I could mummify you into an acceptable entity I wouldn’t still want to hold onto (if we met again, your reality might really make me angry) but that would be like keeping the Soviet statues standing, or like making new statues and naming them grandly, but vaguely, for no history. It would get me nowhere, and I can’t keep on going nowhere in a world where everything is so obviously going somewhere, even here in Sofia where around the statues in the park there are banks of flowers growing so quickly and, circling these, small roads, where the sparse traffic flows round roundabouts. And I am beginning to reattach reasons to events, like car jump leads, like wires on a life-support machine, to different nodes of meaning none of which are anything to do with you. I am beginning to make stories about myself that bypass you altogether. Am I moving on?

  You said, ‘I don’t know why I was so angry with you’.

  It might have been because I told you you were boring.

  Face-to-face, that might have been the last thing I ever said to you.

  You only kill time when you are bored, and I must have bored you half to death. The opposite of killing time is spending it. Sofia would like me to spend more time – in its parks, its restaurants, its department stores – but the capital just hasn’t got the hang of capitalised time yet: it can’t fix desire to duration with the glue of brochured words, and make me pay for it, though it’s trying. Beside the statue-women, I have passed other huge women on signs for casinos and for strip clubs, and they are not named HOPE or FRIENDSHIP, but SEX, or MONEY. The women on the front of the RENT-A-GIRL MODEL AGENCY look just like the women on the poster for Business Girl magazine that covers the news stand, and I’m getting confused. In the meantime, the city tries its best to bore its visitors, as well as its population, who have no doubt seen too much of boredom’s alternative form: violence.