In Defense of Idleness

María Eugenia Colón
Departamento de Filosofía
Facultad de Humanidades, UPR RP

I feel a lot less lately. I don’t really need to be looked at. Not even in a bad way or anything. Tragedy just gets so boring. I didn’t really know a joy that didn’t emerge as a mechanism against despair. I know too many Misses Havisham not to think that: Despair is pretty fucking funny. Despair is hilarious. Some of us like to bask in our misery like we discovered it.

 

We lay on the beach like lizards

letting the sun scald their skin

on an indifferent summer’s day.

And our corpses smell of salt,

and algae mixes with our straw hair,

and dead sea urchins surface from our mouths

to feed the flamboyant Caribbean fish.

Our seas are full of freshly picked sunflowers.

 

Comedy is so much harder to achieve. Shakespeare’s genius: a perfectly timed dick joke. But also, fuck timing. And using our hands to write, and forcing words out of our still palpitating throats. Idleness: man’s true purpose. (If I consider others to be ends, then why do I measure my own worth based on productivity?)

 

Sitting in silence, staring up at a tree; there shouldn’t be much else.

An emerald rosary hangs from a starving branch. If you look up for long enough, you realize the sky is hyperventilating.  Mesmerized, I began to weep. So, I saturated my favorite forest green sweater with snot. And while I slid my sleeve under my sandy fur coat, I was overtaken by the thrilled laughter of a sadist widow.

Embracing soothing disgust under the untreatable heavens was the closest I ever got to salvation.

And I was free to die in peace, without reproach.

It felt like I hadn’t started school yet. I didn’t owe my life to anyone. Back when I could just watch that Natalie Portman love scene in Star Wars over and over and over again, and I slept in between my parents, and I grabbed strangers’ butt cheeks in public. And I didn’t have to worry about anyone knowing what a kooky little freak I am. And no one had trauma tattooed on their forehead.

Martyrdom doesn’t do much for salvation. Whoever said salvation was individual anyway? Someone like me probably. Commiseration has never really been my thing. So I stopped feeding my desire for the sun. Because I don’t really want what I yearn. Because there’s no tragedy without desire: and no desire fulfilled without tragedy. Hence, I must strive to be permanently dissatisfied. Oh! But do I have to? I must stop feeding my desire for the sun. Because widespread freedom is too costly: I settled on longing for an understanding partner. Someone whose moral absolution would make me feel like finally engaging with the earth’s seducing putrefaction. But I’m too lazy (meaning I enjoy boredom too much) to want to be defined by anything.

Posted on December 7, 2021 by Sol Catala Valentin.