Beautiful boredom: passing time in sprawl
In this perpetual state of enforced isolation, I have been pondering boredom and its changing form since my childhood. Technology has changed boredom. Unlimited information at our fingertips and on the screens around us has made me think of a litany of T.S. Eliot’s in The Rock:
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
More importantly I mutate and develop his words in my own question: where is the imagination we have lost in boredom? The boredom of my youth seemed to go on longer.
The Latin term ‘tempus fugit’, time flies, applies more as time goes on. Our perception of time is relative, the more we live the shorter it seems to go by. When we are children, a year of life amounts to a large chunk of our existence. All seemingly mundane things are new and excite us. As Patrick Kavanagh writes in ‘Advent’:
And the newness that was in every stale thing
When we looked at it as children
The idleness and boredom of youth makes an imagination thrive.
Now stuck within a 2km radius during the pandemic boredom is flowing through the veins of society. Despite a certain dread that comes with staring at screens more time has allowed me to watch the film that has loitered too long on the mantle or that yellow-paged book that I am ashamed not to have opened or listen to a new album from an artist I have never heard of or find something I love and listen more intensely to the music and lyrics.
Two songs off Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs album of 2010 are the anthems of disappearing youth and the faded cellulose memories of childhood: Sprawl I (Flatland) and Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains). Urban sprawl appears in the science fiction novels of William Gibson that ruminate on near future urbanism. Gibson speculated that cities will blend together in an endless parade of urbanity; there will be no escape from urban life and the rich pastures of beyond and of the past will be paved over and over.
Sprawl I (Flatland) sees the despondent narrator Win Butler driving along the streets of his childhood, through the suburban sprawl spreading out into the flatlands of Texas where the horizon slices the sun at evening and the whistling lint is whipped up by the wind. He is estranged from his youth, observing the phantoms of his past: the bike riders and the strolling explorers and the periodic feeling of dread when the evening comes and the light begins to dissolve.
The electro pop Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) talks of the dreaded light and the opportunity in darkness. Now the narrator is another band member, Regine Chassagne. In the sprawl there is sameness: behind the mountains, there are more mountains; behind the malls, there are more malls; behind the houses, there are more houses as far as the horizon.
However, when the light dissolves at evening she could emerge, swim to the surface and go out into the unknown. At night she lets her curiosty loose.
Dublin surburbia differs vastly to the distant spreading skies and flatlands of the memories of Butler and Chassagne yet when I listen to this song it always leaves me replaying in my mind the phantoms of my own past and what they did to pass the time.
My childhood was set in the utopia of a suburban cul-de-sac.
I passed the time.
I swept the pavement spreading dust clouds into the air and picked moss from the narrow gaps in patchwork pavements. Exposed early to the eternal punishment of Sisyphus I would return each morning to see more dust and more buds of moss formations. I engaged in the casual wit of petty vandalism and scratched the letters of warning signs that said ‘No ball games allowed” to read the exact opposite ‘ball games allowed’, ‘pick up dog dirt!’ became the enthusiastic call for ‘dog dirt!’ The intended use of the sign was confided to the realms of parody. I used to knick-knack on doors and hop into wheelie bins and race like Ben Hur on the ring of the Circus Maximus. On hot days I would stamp my fingerprint into the ooze of melting tar or seize the fleeting circumstance of wet cement and stamp and scrawl on it and it made me think my graffiti would remain in permanence like the incriminating Lucius pinxit, painted by Lucius, the graffiti scraped on some terracotta brick in Pompeii. Once, a neighbour shot a milktruck with a water rifle and the milkmen threw cartons of milk at us that exploded like grenades all over the streets and white liquid made rivers in the grooves of tar mac, running down into the brown gutters.
Boredom hit me so hard once that I played a four-player game of Monopoly against myself – the west highland terrier, the top hat, the thimble, the wheelbarrow. Monopoly is both a board game and a game for the bored. I poured all players an individual glass of cranberry juice and gave each a bowl of cheese & onion crisps.
I always loved the thimble and in truth, I failed in remaining unbiased.
I would prefer one version of myself than the other and the game became a version of some social experiment performed on rodents; a case study of the workings of the human brain.
The wheelbarrow would simply refuse to pay for the deep navy of Ailesbury and Shrewsbury and instead aim to build hotels on Crumlin and Kimmage.
The top hat had a sole aim of buying the utilities and Busáras and the airports and Heuston station.
The terrier hoarded his money like he was preparing for an apocalypse, avoiding the property market and instead saving his coin for tinned goods.
Whereas in the midst of it all, the thimble had a calculated approach which he could adapt to changing circumstance. Well-structured but aggressive, willing to mortgage properties. A Machiavellian who would thrive on crushing another with high rates at myriad hotels.
The thimble, my favourite, would always win. I don’t know what this says about me.
Passing time in the suburban sprawl was the manifestation of curiosity. Passing time in adulthood has mutated into a different beast, more worry, more overthinking, less time spent in the peculiar dimension of daydream.
All I can do now is listen to the anthems of sprawl, of nostalgia for the past, of a disappearing youth and sprawl my very self out in an ungainly style on freshly mown grass. A wren will bathe itself in the birdbath lined in scum, entering dirty and leaving dirtier. The compost will be placed at the foot of dying plants to bring new life in Spring. The charm of goldfinches will sing and peck their pointed beaks into a cage of nuts. A suck on the bulb of a hanging fuchsia like a drug will send me running ceaselessly back towards the beautiful boredom of my past.