Doing stuff
It is early evening, a Wednesday, the beginning of June. I am queuing at a passport control at Gate 64 inside Schoenefeld airport just outside of Berlin. An hour or so and my plane back to London is scheduled to depart. The queue in the dreary corridor is long, hardly moving forward at all. My heavy hand luggage is carving a red mark on my shoulder, the air is sticky and hot. We are made to wait and there is not a single seat provided, nor a clock, nor a departure board. We are made to wait for what seems for ages and nothing has moved for a while. The guy in front of me, a violinist, friendly looking, with wild ginger hair, striped shirt and Greek sandals, is reading in his sketchbook and now and then he scribbles something in. Further up the line several others wearing suits are immersed in the technology of their phones. One woman is struggling with the big format of her newspaper. On my right someone has sat down on the floor. Leaning aback at the wall he is staring intensely at the laptop on his knees, and typing. Behind me, for the third or so time, a man with a Spanish accent impatiently addresses his question to no-one in particular: “Are you sure this is going to Gatwick?” Suspended in this blank corridor everyone is doing something for the moment. Everyone is busy investing their time. I decide to do nothing, just to feel how it feels to wait – and of course I know I am still doing something.
Making a living
On the final spurt of cycling to my nine-hour café workshift in the morning – always in a hurry, always already ten minutes late – there is a restaurant on the touristy Southbank, which I pass. Along its window pane runs this cunning quote by a mighty Theophrasus: “Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend”, and then next to it the catchy bargain-offers are written on the blackboard: set lunch with coffee included, only –
O Bartleby!
What luxury!
Time is currency.
Herman Melville’s character Bartleby earns his money as a scrivener in a lawyer’s office on Wall Street. Yet, whenever he is asked to fulfill the tasks that define his job the young, pale man instead utters the same fomulaic, abrupt phrase “I would prefer not to”. And throughout the entire story this is basically, absurdly, all he ever does. With polite perseverence Bartleby persists in refusing to do anything, and does this with consequence up to the point when finally he will not work at all. Eventually he will not even leave the office any more to go home and sleep. And he cannot be sent away either because he quite simply prefers not to. In his outrageous inefficiency and smooth indetermination of never saying “yes” or “no” Bartleby inhabits a bizarre power to control and undermine his environment, which, situated in Financial District NYC, is capitalism. Bartleby’s grotesquely unproductive behaviour – his not doing – breaches the capitalist structures within which he tragically exists. For Deleuze Bartleby trickily introduces a ‘logic of preference:’ by being idle he undoes the so far seemingly normal logic of reference and definition and opens its frame to subjectivity and re-interpretation. This is probably also the reason why in the eyes of the employer as well as the other colleagues he is more than a purely negative, destructive spirit. They are strangely fascinated with Bartleby because they sense and sympathise with his (futile) longing for a meaningful existence. And somehow, in a peculiar way, Bartleby’s aimlessness unfolds a rebellious potential to flip and experience meanings differently. Although silent and withdrawn into his cubicle Bartleby’s presence remains and is hauntingly reflected in the firm’s atmosphere and, most significantly, in its changing work ethics. To get rid of him it is the employer himself who takes the action to relocate his entire firm to another office. Bartleby though, even despite the new tenants, still continues to hang out in the corridors of the building. And, paradoxically, it is on the very basis of Bartleby’s adamant immobility that he will be treated like a tramp and put into prison. Here then he also starves because he preferred not to – you guessed it: eat.
“So if Bartleby didn’t even eat, would there be a point in saying that he consumed nothing but his time?”
“Well, his poise seems quite unnerving as well. Stuff is falling apart”.
“...until he himself passes away too? Because Bartleby somehow is time? What did Nietzsche write in How we become what we are?”
“We are what we eat? Or was it: to be or not to be?”
“Spending a life time making a living... that has potential for a narrative crisis”.
“You do ramble a lot of nonsense sometimes”.
Killing time, the Great Nothing
I tear open the soft, transparent plastic bags and take out eight slices of fresh fluffy bread: this will produce four sandwiches at a time, each one with a thick filling of various plain yet fancy ingredients: pesto, mozarella, spinach and rocket leaves, slices of tomato and parma ham. I layer all the ingredients artfully upon one another, press the second slice of bread on top, hold it all down with one hand and, with the other hand, cut it in two with the knife. My hands automatically fulfill the movements of flipping the two halves to a pile and wrapping them up in clear foil. The finished piece is beautiful, its front a mosaic in red, green and white. For the first three hours of my shift I am preparing sandwiches in the tiny kitchen behind the counter. I am alone. I do not speak. The action is repetitive. I find myself in a loop where past and future moment resemble each other so strongly it is as if someone had pressed “pause” on me: the present feels elongated. It makes me feel calm and empty. The sandwiches just happen. I am not interested. My mind drifts and my gaze wanders outside the window. In the sky a fish zigzags in and out of the clouds. On the riverbank a fisherman throws the shirt he has just caught back into the Thames. A woman is changing her plane whilst walking the dog and a child is eating a spray can that talks to a hedge. Try not to think, empty a word of its meaning:
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sandwich, sandwich, sandwich, sandwich, sandwich, sandwich, sandwich, sandwich,
sandwich, sandwich, sandwich, sandwich, sandwich, sandwich,
sandwich, sandwich, sandwich, sandwich, sandwich