Doing Nothing

Freedom is not a prescription.

We are all exhausted, supposedly.

We live in an age of perpetual crises – polycrises, even. The planet is on fire. The wrong sort of people are in office. Capitalism is still here, much to everyone’s surprise. We are beset by bad ideas and worse politics, by wars and rumors of wars. We are strung out, burnt out, screen addicted. We live amidst a continuing collapse of meaning and a definitive collapse of wealth, suggesting we don’t have much in the way of spiritual or economic futures. We live at the haunted dead end of history, which has had enough of us and decided to stop.

What are we to do about this? What about doing nothing?

Nothing, and how to do it.

I recently read Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Odell is a Bay Area visual artist and academic. She created the beguiling Bureau of Suspended Objects, a collection of discarded items that ended their working lives in a landfill. For the Bureau, Odell painstakingly gathered and catalogued an array of 200 objects, ranging from a globe to a discarded Air Bud VHS. She tracked down and published each of their histories.

The Bureau of Suspended Objects is a strange and immersive piece. Odell has described it as “making nothing” and “just an excuse for me to stare at the amazing things in the dump [and] give each object the attention it was due.”

At the opening, a confused and somewhat indignant woman turned to me and said, ‘Wait…so did you actually make anything? Or did you just put things on shelves?’ I often say that my medium is context, so the answer was yes to both.

How To Do Nothing is, I think, a spiritual successor to The Bureau of Suspended Objects. In How to Do Nothing, Odell is specifically concerned with how to survive in the attention economy, how to live in the foxholes of social media’s blasted landscapes. The answer, she thinks, has to do with attention itself, a precious resource strip-mined by algorithms and enslaved by capital. It also has to do with resistance. Overwhelmed by a world that demands we always have something to show for our time, Odell wonders whether it’s possible to opt out of modern dictates. In a sprawling and delightfully discursive book, Odell ponders a few ways to fight back, hopping from birdwatching to the politics of land use and urban planning to community networks to a consideration of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International as a “total conflation of art and life.” Throughout, Odell advocates a return to the immediate, local and ecological. She articulates a future built on paying close attention to significant things.

How to Do Nothing is a wise book. But I want to take issue with Odell’s premise, because I don’t think she’s teaching us how to do nothing. 

Always be doing something.

Odell’s book is, in her own words, a “field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy.” As the book progresses, the emphasis shifts from the doing of nothing to the doing of political resistance. It makes sense. Doing nothing can’t really be the focus of a life well lived, certainly not for those who - like Odell, like me - see collective action as necessary for social change. It can be a sort of rebellion, sure. A refusal or negation of the prevailing societal winds, a feint at reclaiming our humanity. But doing nothing is, apparently, something that you do for higher ideals, which make demands on you and which you must serve. Nothing is a thing that needs doing, and doing for a purpose - just like everything else in life. 

In Odell’s hands, doing nothing becomes a political act quite quickly, and maybe in the end is nothing more than that. She has good political goals in mind. She wants us to move away from the splintered and miserable black-hole suck of capitalist modernity, back towards the nature we live amidst and the communities we live within. She offers a modern take on Timothy Leary’s “turn up, tune in, drop out”, tailored this time to a certain political sensibility. Doing nothing becomes a refusal of one thing as a path towards embracing another, better way of being. 

But again: Nothing - even doing nothing - can exist without a purpose. This strikes me as a peculiarly American sort of guilt, demanding that everything we do needs to be justified, to have a use. Our lives are always subsidiary to the dictates of something - religion, conscience, conviction, love of country, party or cause. In modern American life, though, there are very few avenues available for the sort of exertion that can make our lives worthwhile. We need total meaning, something to give our lives a shape and a teleology. 

And so we turn to politics. 

The politicization of everything is not a new phenomenon. There are many reasons for it. Some I understand, others I do not. Our age is clearly hyper-connected. We can access a lot of information. We speak, see and act with a certain degree of visibility. We are linked to a lot more people, or at least we feel that we are. Problems become immediate and immediately outsized. At the same time, our avenues for doing anything about them aren’t plentiful and can’t match the high drama of our times. The stakes require something sufficiently vast and intense to match. Politics is the only thing left that fits the bill.

But our politics can become so central to our sense of self that we risk becoming nothing but our political beliefs. The politicization of everything means that we’re always acting under a mandate, which is fucking exhausting. Because the stakes are everything, and because there is always more to do, we are always lacking. We are always insufficiently engaged with and attuned to the problems of the world, which are endless and endlessly overwhelming. It is all too much. When everything in life is subsumed to a political dictate, things lose definition. Life starts to feel shallow and overheated. 

What does this all mean for how we live? I think we end up doing one of two things. We do nothing - but not the intentional, joyful, rebellious sort of nothing Odell wants. Instead, we end up crippled by the sheer weight of our tasks, shocked into a sort of paralysis that is neither useful nor restorative. Or we do what we want and ascribe a political valence after the fact. For people of my generation, that seems to involve labeling literally everything we do - no matter how selfish or insignificant - as a radical act. 

The writer Clare Coffey has a wonderful send-up of just this type of problem, our failure to cope under capitalism. Capitalism, in this reading, is a political problem, “and if only political problems are legitimate, only political solutions are admissible.” This has, she says, “the odd effect of filtering all attempts at self-integration through a political lens, hence the proliferation of articles explaining why brushing your teeth in the morning is a radical act.”  And because the problem posed by capitalism is so immense, our choices are never really our own. “The totalizing nature of capital’s domination simultaneously excuses us from revolutionary action and from an attempt at a life with honor within it.”

Odell, however, seems to think that we can do something with the right sort of resistance. In a chapter on “creative refusal”, she zeroes in on two characters - one real, one fictional. The first is Diogenes of Sinope. Diogenes was a fourth-century Greek philosopher and one of the founders of Cynicism, a man Plato described as “Socrates gone mad.” Diogenes did (or was rumored to have done) a lot of weird shit. He lived in a tub with nothing but a stick and a cloak. He roamed Athens’ streets with a lantern, looking for an honest man. “Exhibiting something like an aesthetics of reversal, he would walk backward down the street and enter a theater only when people were leaving…he would roll over hot sand in the summer, and hug statues covered with snow.” In the words of American art critic Thomas McEvilley, Diogenes’ “general theme was the complete and immediate reversal of all familiar values, on the ground that they are automatizing forces which cloud more of life than they reveal.”

The second is Bartleby, the Scrivener. Bartleby is the central figure of Herman Melville’s eponymous short story, a copyist for a Wall Street lawyer who, when given a task, answers: “I would prefer not to.” Here’s Odell on Bartleby:

When the lawyer asks Bartleby if he’ll tell him where he was born, Bartleby answers, “I would prefer not to.” The lawyer asks desperately: ‘Will you tell me any thing about yourself?’ ‘I would prefer not to.’ But why? ‘At present I prefer to give no answer.’ There is no reason given, no reason given as to why no reason is given, and so on.

Bartleby’s “next-level refusal” is so complete it “negates the terms of the question” asked. Odell approvingly cites the French theorist Gilles Deleuze, who thinks that Bartleby’s response “carve[s] out a kind of foreign language within language, to make the whole confront silence, make it topple into silence.”

Diogenes and Bartleby are necessary in any stage of history, Odell thinks. Their refusal to comply opens up a “third space” - an “almost magical exit to another frame of reference.” This third space is one of “refusal, boycott and sabotage.” The third space can be reached by will, desire and training - “it’s through these things that we find and initiate the third space, and more important, how we stay there.” When made a collective act, the third space “can become a spectacle of noncompliance that registers on the larger scale of the public.”

We are very far from doing nothing here, aren’t we? More than that - we have a political program that’s nearly impossible to actually follow. Diogenes was an asshole, people fucking hated him, and his radical lessons have little to do with everyday life. Bartleby, too, is impossible. He is a figure from a dream, following dream logic. We are not these people. Their feats are beyond us. At most, their radical rejection acts as a mental check - a reminder that things could be different, but aren’t. Not for us, anyway.

So even doing nothing can’t escape political prescriptions, of the sort that never let up. They freight every moment with unbearable significance. If your actions matter so much, at some point everything you’ve done or left undone will rise up around you and swallow you whole.

I have often wondered where these sorts of commandments come from, and why we seem so drawn to them. Freud wrote of a superego, an insane chattering thing we carry around inside us like a curse. It weighs us and finds us wanting, always, and it speaks to us of nothing else. Adam Phillips, a British psychoanalyst, says this about it:

Lacan​ said that there was surely something ironic about Christ’s injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself – because actually, of course, people hate themselves. Or you could say that, given the way people treat one another, perhaps they had always loved their neighbours in the way they loved themselves: that is, with a good deal of cruelty and disregard…the self-critical part of ourselves, the part that Freud calls the super-ego, has some striking deficiencies: it is remarkably narrow-minded; it has an unusually impoverished vocabulary; and it is, like all propagandists, relentlessly repetitive. It is cruelly intimidating – Lacan writes of ‘the obscene super-ego’ – and it never brings us any news about ourselves. There are only ever two or three things we endlessly accuse ourselves of, and they are all too familiar; a stuck record, as we say, but in both senses – the super-ego is reiterative. It is the stuck record of the past (‘something there badly not wrong’, Beckett’s line from Worstward Ho, is exactly what it must not say) and it insists on diminishing us. It is, in short, unimaginative; both about morality, and about ourselves. Were we to meet this figure socially, this accusatory character, this internal critic, this unrelenting fault-finder, we would think there was something wrong with him. He would just be boring and cruel. We might think that something terrible had happened to him, that he was living in the aftermath, in the fallout, of some catastrophe. 

The voice is somewhere in our hearts, I think. We cannot seem to abandon it completely. It is partly the project of psychoanalysis and religion to reconcile us with this fact (Beatrice to Dante, in Purgatory: “From dread and shame I want you / to evolve, so you no longer speak / as in a dream”), but I do not think it has worked. 

Our hearts are cruel taskmasters. As the culture critic Freddie DeBoer notes, “while we’re compelled to do good, we are not equipped to be good, not all the time.” The rest of life - politics, technology, capitalism, revolt - are tools and not ends, so a rejection of these things still leaves us with ourselves, in need of something to declare us as righteous. Everything we do - including nothing, apparently - is an attempt to get our hearts to shut up.

How do we get out?

Paying attention.

The very best part of How to Do Nothing is Chapter 4, “Exercises in Attention.” Here, Odell offers a series of meditations on paying attention, mediated through a series of artists and artworks she loves. Two of them - David Hockney and John Cage - are particularly meaningful to me, too.

David Hockney is a British painter and visual artist, the supreme modernist - a “painter’s painter”, Odell calls him. He is known primarily for his sun-drenched, pastel-like reveries of California, a dreamworld of flat lines and supersaturation.  My favorite of these, 1967’s A Bigger Splash, is a simple thing. A bright sunlit pool is fronted by a diving board and backed by two towering palms. No one’s visible. There’s only one chair poolside, and it’s empty. But the painting bears the filigree of a plunge just completed, the delicate tendrils of white water leaping upward.

Hockney hated photography, at first. For Hockney, “an image contained the amount of time that went into making it, so that when someone looked at one of his paintings, they began to inhabit the physical, bodily time of its being painted.” Photos, however, got time all wrong. Per Hockney, “photography is alright if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops - for a split second. But that’s not what it’s like to live in the world, or to convey the experience of living in the world.”

One day, however, Hockney picked up a friend’s Polaroid and started wandering around his home, shooting at will. He was struck by how, with some nifty composition, the camera could recreate the experience of human perception in time. He assembled great collages of photographs, dozens capturing a single scene - a night playing Scrabble with friends, a fenced-in sliver of American wilderness. He arranged these photos in increasingly abstract patterns, which he called “joiners”:

From that first day, I was exhilarated…I realized that this sort of picture came closer to how we actually see, which is to say, not all at once but rather in discrete, separate glimpses, which we then build into our continuous experience of the world…There are a hundred separate looks across time from which I synthesize my living impression of you. And this is wonderful.

The chaos of Hockney’s joiners mirrors our own sense of moving and perceiving in time, awash in a shifting array of impressions. In Odell’s words, Hockney’s work shows us that “something like collage is at the heart of our unstable and highly personal process of perception.” For the viewer, the results are unexpected. The joiners shock us into looking closely. We see the scene before us. We notice it. We pay it attention. 

Something similar is occurring in the music of John Cage, the avant-garde composer. Cage’s most famous piece is 4’33, a piece where nothing happens for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. That’s what it sounds like, at least at first. The ambient surrounding sounds are what makes up the performance - the music of everything, so to speak. And the music of everything changes constantly. Odell describes seeing a Cage piece live at the San Francisco Symphony. The liner notes explained that it would last “anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes, depending on what happens.” 

A lot did happen. People wandered about the stage playing with various props - a typewriter, a set of cards, a blender. Vocalists made strange sounds. Someone gave an audience member a gift. The conductor made himself a smoothie, eliciting gales of laughter from the audience. Odell was exhilarated:

More than just the conventions of the symphony hall were broken open that night. I walked out of the symphony hall down Grove Street to catch the MUNI, and heard every sound with a new clarity - the cars, the footsteps, the wind, the electric buses. Actually, it wasn’t so much that I heard these clearly as that I heard them at all. How was it, I wondered, that I could have lived in a city for four years already - even having walked down this street after a symphony performance so many times - and never have actually heard anything?

For months after this, I was a different person. At times, it was enough to make me laugh out loud.

The things we notice make the world around us. Hockney and Cage give us something precious in their work. By commandeering our notice and forcing us into the world surrounding our eyes and ears, they give us a chance to live in it. More than that - they literally give us life, handing us slices of experience we never would have noticed otherwise, and thus never would have lived. They give us things and places that would not otherwise be ours. We notice them, we pay them attention, and they become real for us. We are in it, and that’s how we feel. 

This is one of the great joys of art, I think. It can hand our lives back to us, cracked open. In the process we become something different that what we were. 

“Exercises in Attention” is not really about how to pay more or better attention. It is about the power of art to do this for us. I think this has something to do with surprise. As Odell has said elsewhere, “surprise is a way of being reminded that there’s something outside you” (Rebecca Solnit: “You don’t know a place until it surprises you”). The very best sort of art doesn’t demand that you pay it attention - it ambushes you and takes it from you, giving you in a return a new life, a new way of seeing and being. 

It is not something we earn. There is a crack in the order of things, and we walk out of it with a gift, surprised. 

Dark woods.

Dante, at the beginning of his Commedia, is lost in a dark wood. He doesn’t stay there, of course. There is a journey to make - first Inferno, then Purgatory, then Paradise. He descends Hell’s concentric circles. He speaks to the shade of Ulysses, encased in flame forever, who tells him that no earthly duty “could compete / with my ardor to know the world / and all things human, base and noble.” Dante crawls down the back of Satan himself - a mute, brutish creature, entombed in ice and gnawing heretics - and through the center of the earth. He climbs the seven-terraced Mount of Purgatory, “that second kingdom where the human spirit purges itself to become worthy of Heaven.” He drinks from the River Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. He soars upward through a parade of increasingly obscure Catholic theologians, family members and minor Florentine politicians until he flies beyond every word, image and thought. In other words, he makes it out.

But we don’t. That’s why I love the opening verses of Canto I more than anything else in the poem:

Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray

From the straight road and woke to find myself

Alone in a dark wood. How shall I say

What wood that was! I never saw so drear,

So rank, so arduous a wilderness!

Its very memory gives a shape to fear.

It’s the truth. Our lives are spent wandering. We live in uncertainty. The haze and the strangeness is our base reality. We want straight roads but we move in fog. This is a corollary of our limited natures. We do not act perfectly, and we do not enjoy perfect knowledge. We are, as Montaigne noticed, ondoyant et divers - “wavelike and varying.” We can approach the real but never arrive there. 

Odell’s own Bureau of Suspended Objects has a pinned quote from the French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour:

The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms.

Absolute certainty, like all mistakes, tends toward either the banal or the disastrous. We end up quietly and tastefully wrong about something. Or we end up like the condemned man in Jorge Luis Borges’ Deutsches Requiem - a man fired by absolute conviction who misreads everyone and everything en route to commanding a Nazi death camp. We are creatures of limits and borders, not infinities. 

The German philosopher Heidegger thought we live in a kind of forgetfulness, absorbed in the everyday. Lost in what he termed “the falling”, we are separated from others and from ourselves. This has something to do with time - with its nature, and with our experience of it. Heidegger said that we are bound inextricably in finite time, so much so that we are our finitude. We are the onrushing series of moments that pile up, pass us by and then end forever. 

I like this, this notion of time and us in it. If we are our limited time, perhaps it’s best to spend it like we experience it - from moment to moment, immersed in the world as it rushes to meet us. As the anonymous Nineteen Ancient Poems (a famous piece of Chinese poetry from the Han Dynasty) has it:

Man dies within a hundred years

But is filled with a thousand years of grief

Since day is short and night seems long

Why not wander with a candle

Seeking joy while you are in time?

Or a different passage, translated by Jeffrey Yang in the lovely, ambivalent spirit of the original Mandarin:

Wave after wave     endless      yin-yang changes

allotted     years                     like morning dew

Our life is like         a brief visitation         can’t

approach         the longevity of metal       stone

Ten thousand ages      of partings and farewells

the virtuous       the sages               no one lasts

Take elixirs to seek     divine immortality      so

many harmed           by messed up concoctions

Nothing like drinking         good spirits   while

dressed up in                 diaphanous silk clothes

Heidegger, of course, calls us into something else, a laborious attempt to genuinely encounter and know “the other” and be known ourselves in the process. But maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe the laboriousness and the striving is the thing that separates us from the real. Better, maybe, to seek joy while we are in time. Better to drink good spirits while dressed in diaphanous silk.

Of the array of things we can do with our lives, doing nothing is one of them. Doing nothing - really doing nothing, for its own sake, collapses the space between concept and act. It seems like a return to childhood, before the great grey rainclouds of thought and idea moved in. Or maybe it’s something else, a hard-earned wisdom that leads us back to the easy freedom of the immediate. As we get older and wiser, we move away from the idea and return to the thing itself. We act because we act. The philosopher and Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart says, Blake-like, that wisdom is “the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience.” The Trappist monk and contemplative Thomas Merton said something similar, in a delightful essay on why he lived alone in the Kentucky woods:

This is not a hermitage—it is a house. (“Who was that hermitage I seen you with last night? . . .”) What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe. Who said Zen? Wash out your mouth if you said Zen. If you see a meditation going by, shoot it. Who said “Love?” Love is in the movies. The spiritual life is something people worry about when they are so busy with something else they think they ought to be spiritual. Spiritual life is guilt. Up here in the woods is seen the New Testament: that is to say, the wind comes through the trees and you breathe it.

And later:

Sermon to the birds: “Esteemed friends, birds of noble lineage, I have no message to you except this: be what you are: be birds. Thus you will be your own sermon to yourselves!”

Reply: “Even this is one sermon too many!

Genuine freedom might be a thing that simply happens, unbidden. It might be a state we move into and out of at random. Maybe we can't summon it - maybe we're shocked into it. It surprises us. The best we can do is cultivate the conditions for its exercise. 

I feel the need to add the usual disclaimers. Doing nothing is impractical, maybe impossible. Actions obviously matter. We live in a world of call and response, of action and reaction. Life is largely suffering. What little we can do to mitigate that in ourselves and others seems greatly important.

But that is the moralist in me, the theologian and politician. I know their commands by heart. But I’ve never successfully followed even one of them. Better, maybe, to do nothing at all.

The gateway of all subtleties.

In Doing Nothing, Odell recounts the story of the useless tree, by the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, one of the founders of Daoism. The tale varies slightly depending on source and translation. Here’s the version from my copy of Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings, translated by Brook Ziporyn:

Huizi said to Zhuangzi, "I have a huge tree that people call the Stinktree. The trunk is swollen and gnarled, impossible to align with any level or ruler. The branches are twisted and bent, impossible to align to any T-square or carpenter's arc. Even if it were growing right in the road, a carpenter would not give it so much as a second glance. And your words are similarly big but useless, which is why they are rejected by everyone who hears them."

Zhuangzi said, "Haven't you ever seen the wildcats and the weasels? They crouch low to await any straggling prey, then pounce east or west in an elegantly arcing leap, high or low without hesitation. But this is exactly what lands them in a trap, and they end up dying in the net. But take a yak: It is big like the clouds draped across the heavens. What it's good at is just being big - and of course it cannot catch so much as a single mouse. 

You, on the other hand, have this big tree and you worry that it's useless. How you could loaf and wander, doing a whole lot of nothing there at its side! How far-flung and unfettered you'd be, dozing there beneath it! It will never be cut down by ax or saw. Nothing will harm it. Since it has nothing for which it can be used, what could entrap or afflict it?"

Odell connects the story to Old Survivor, the last remaining old-growth redwood in the Bay Area. Shrunken and gnarled, perched precipitously atop an impassable rock scree, Old Survivor withstood the successive waves of logging that stripped these California hills of their original woods - living giants, some far older than Christ. Only Old Survivor remains. It is a hero and a site of pilgrimage for many Californians, Odell included. Like Zhuangzi’s Stinktree, its uselessness is its armor. 

Odell sees these trees as embodying a “resistance-in-place.” “To resist in place”, she tells us, “is to make oneself into a shape that cannot be so easily appropriated by a capitalist value system.” It is also to stay put, to put down roots. This uselessness, this specific brand of doing nothing - it’s this way of living, Odell thinks, that could offer us some solace.

I’m not so sure. I think these trees might be embodying nothing at all. They have nothing to teach us. And we have nothing to learn from them, nothing to prove to ourselves and others. We are free to simply loaf in their shade, far-flung and unfettered, doing a whole lot of nothing.

Odell reaches something like this conclusion at the very end of her book, when she describes watching brown pelicans cross San Francisco Bay, “greeting me one at a time with their joyous six-foot wingspans”:

Standing perpendicular to the earth, not pitching forward, not falling back, I asked how I could possibly express my gratitude for the unlikely spectacle of the pelicans. The answer was nothing. Just watch.

“Nothing.” “Just watch.” Those are words for life, I think. Words for a state of grace. Words for an innocence at the far end of experience. When we walk in the woods, and the wind comes through the trees, and we breathe it.