15 09 20

Boyer, The Undying

I wan­ted to write about exhaus­tion the way I used to write about love. Like love, exhaus­tion both requires lan­guage and baffles it, and like love, it is not as if exhaus­tion will kill you, no mat­ter how many times you might declare that you are dying of it.

Exhaustion is not like death, either, which has a plot and a rea­der­ship. Exhaustion is boring, requires no genius, is demo­cra­tic in prac­tice, lacks fans. In this, it’s like expe­ri­men­tal lite­ra­ture.

I was once not exhaus­ted, and then I was. I got sick, and then the late effects of treat­ment made me exhaus­ted. I was taken to the moment of deple­tion and then taken past that, and after my reco­ve­ry kept there in the pro­ba­bly fore­ver of never-all-bet­ter, sin­king fur­ther and fur­ther into exhaustion’s ground. What hap­pens if you can no lon­ger self-repair ? To be deple­ted is not to die : it is to bare­ly do some­thing else.

Exhaustion is a culmi­na­tion of his­to­ry pre­sen­ted in one body, then ano­ther, then ano­ther. If exhaus­tion as a sub­ject has become new­ly popu­lar it is because a once-pro­le­ta­rian fee­ling has now become a fee­ling of the pro­le­ta­ria­ni­zed all.

*

The exhaus­ted are always trying, even when they don’t want to, even when they are too exhaus­ted to name trying as trying or to think about it like that. The trying of the exhaus­ted is fuel for the machine that keeps run­ning them over in the first place. Life doesn’t have to be hap­py to be long.

Trying is the method of tra­ve­ling with a body through efforts to find the limit of those efforts’ ends. You just can’t, but have to. Now you will. First a breath, next an achie­ve­ment, then ano­ther com­bi­na­tion of attempts, a fai­lure or a nap or a bad deci­sion, all in an attempt at attemp­ting, eating a high-pro­tein after­noon snack and playing out with one’s exis­tence existing’s limit-end.

The exhaus­ted are plas­tic and adap­table. They bend bet­ter and more to what is neces­sa­ry for their having been worn down. They live as fluid­ly as the water into which a corpse tied with rocks has been plun­ged or into which a ship sank or from which a dol­phin sur­fa­ced.

The exhaus­ted have a desire : to no lon­ger be exhaus­ted. The exhaus­ted can have this one desire, to no lon­ger be exhaus­ted, as the pre­re­qui­site for the pos­si­bi­li­ty of again having many desires, to no lon­ger be exhaus­ted so that they can want some­thing other, to want what they real­ly want, which is to no lon­ger be exhaus­ted, so that their bodies can offer the pos­si­bi­li­ty again of love or art or plea­sure, of thin­king without regret­ting, of achie­ve­ment, too, or some­thing beyond fai­led and sor­row­ful trying at the bare­ly.

Our wan­ting is not our wan­ting, exact­ly, when it is expo­sed like this through being too tired to want any­thing. What the exhaus­ted once belie­ved was a desire from inside them sho­wed itself to be a desire from what was out­side, what had been there before them and what was orde­red by wha­te­ver wasn’t them.

But it’s not that abs­tract, ener­gy and lack of it ; and not that abs­tract, being too worn out to want any­thing but to not be worn out any­more ; and not that abs­tract, the hyper­fo­cu­sed fore­ver of not having enough of any life to do with it what one could. The exhaus­ted are exhaus­ted because they sell the hours of their lives to sur­vive their lives, then they use the hours they haven’t sold to get their lives rea­dy for sel­ling, and the hours after that to do the same for the other lives they love.

*

A per­son can be any­thing, she is told, if she puts her mind to it in the eco­no­mic zone of unfet­te­red per­so­nal pos­si­bi­li­ty. It’s the free trade of souls across the open bor­ders of inde­fa­ti­ga­bi­li­ty. It’s a series of hori­zon-wide choices unli­mi­ted by limi­ta­tions except for how all pos­si­bi­li­ties will be cir­cum­scri­bed by the capa­ci­ty to exhaust one­self to dis­co­ver a possibility’s end.

Fate was ship­wre­cked, so in its place, they sent us agen­cy. Free to love, free to work, free to get, free to enter mul­tiple and contrac­tual and sub­con­trac­tual realms in which each ele­ment of a person’s exis­tence is nego­tia­ted to the effect of deter­mi­ning her posi­tion only by how it wears her out.

In this ver­sion of free­dom, the invi­si­bi­li­ty of all fences is the point of eve­ry invi­sible fence. The appa­rent lack of limits among the limits mys­ti­fies both limits and limit­less­ness. There are hori­zons that sink, roads and high­ways that seem to go on for as long as one has the capa­ci­ty to tra­vel them, and then, at the place at which it wears you out, you find a real fence.

Freedom ends exact­ly there, hung up on your own system’s fai­lure, a for­mer dyna­mo that is now an eva­po­ra­ted ani­mal, all free ener­gy having been expen­ded free­ly in a quest toward freedom’s end.

*

The exhaus­ted rise each day, or at least most of them do. That they rise most days is tes­ta­ment to the dis­tance bet­ween how a per­son feels and what they do.

A per­son can and often does rise in a will-optio­nal attempt at get­ting out of bed, and when they can’t rise, it’s almost never from lack of wan­ting to. No mat­ter how much they just can’t, the exhaus­ted, if they are living, conti­nue to. They conti­nue to, like eve­ryone who does until they don’t any­more, but they conti­nue to more mise­ra­bly than those who are not exhaus­ted yet. To live and so to eat, drink water, to find a method—work or love—by which to afford to eat, to pay their bills and pay their taxes, to use the bathroom, to put on clothes, to care for their loved ones, requires that they rise, at least some­times. The exhaus­ted might almost do what they are sup­po­sed to do, but as a conse­quence of their deple­tion, they almost never do what they want. The exhaus­ted don’t die. Or if they do die, it is only once, like eve­ryone else, and from any­thing. An exhaus­ted body almost always pro­vides the wrong infor­ma­tion. The wrong infor­ma­tion is also the right infor­ma­tion : things can’t go on like this, and so they do, and what gets pro­ved is the blur­red edge bet­ween being alive and being dead.

Living takes the shape of the effort to exist. In the long night of this effort to exist’s case file, each hour recedes into a lack of ener­gy to achieve a mea­sure of that hour’s length. Everything is tried—that’s how it gets exhausted—and a per­son trying to take notes on this writes, “I’m exhaus­ted,” because they are too tired to put down their pen.

*

That you will run out of your­self trying to make your­self is the yogic pre­lude to the entre­pre­neu­rial rules of exis­ting. It’s the epoch of yes ; the age of unli­mi­ted can, a mass exis­tence in the soma-pathe­tic fal­la­cy of the body and earth toge­ther regis­te­ring the alar­ming tex­ture of our mutual expi­ra­tion.

Here’s an asa­na of auto-exploi­ta­tion :

First, a breath. Then swea­ting. Now swea­ting with brea­thing. Then achie­ve­ment. Then email and swea­ting. Now brea­thing and achie­ving and emai­ling. Now wor­king while brea­thing. Now fai­lure and slee­ping and brea­thing. Now refu­sing to sleep while brea­thing or attemp­ting to refuse to breathe while still swea­ting and fai­ling and achie­ving.

Exhaustion as a method of exis­ting com­bines all actions until it finds the edges of the shape of existing’s end. Like eve­ry­thing alea­to­ry, as a method it has one out­come : pos­si­bi­li­ty. This pos­si­bi­li­ty is most­ly the pos­si­bi­li­ty that all things will end in exhaus­tion.

The exhaus­ted find their ener­gy was­ted again. Sleep, which is often the reme­dy for tired­ness, disap­points the exhaus­ted. Sleep is full of the work of dreams, full of the way that sleep begets more sleep, full of the way that more sleep can beget more exhaus­tion, and that more exhaus­tion begets more exhaus­tion for which the reme­dy is almost never just sleep.

The exhaus­ted are the saints of the was­ted life, if a saint is a per­son who is bet­ter than others at suf­fe­ring. What the exhaus­ted suf­fer bet­ter is the way bodies and time are so often at odds with each other in our time of overw­hel­ming and confu­sed chro­ni­ci­ty, when each hour is ampli­fied past cir­ca­dia­nism, qua­dru­pled in the quarter-hour’s agen­da, Pomodoro-ed, hacked, FOMO-ed, and pro­duc­ti­vi­zed. The exhaus­ted are the human evi­dence of each minute misun­ders­tood to be an empire for finance, of each human body misun­ders­tood to be an ins­tru­ment that should play a thou­sand com­pliant songs at once.

*

We can’t mea­sure spi­rit. This because it isn’t real, or at least because it is not mate­rial, but it feels real when we become acu­te­ly aware of our own ari­di­ty. But no mat­ter how poten­tial­ly una­live or indis­tinct an exhaus­ted per­son feels inside of her­self, her body will look like a body, dis­creet, alive and ani­mate, and capable of trying more, of trying har­der, of impro­ving or reme­dying or aspi­ring or pro­du­cing.

We are never our spi­rits’ contai­ners. No person’s body is mar­ked with a mea­su­ring line. No one knows how bound­less we once were or could be, and by loo­king, no one knows what it used to feel like to exist, and how dif­ferent it feels to exist now, or how we were once full and are now deple­ted. The water is gone because the emp­ty glass tells us so. In order to appear used up, a body has to look like a par­ti­cu­lar life’s packa­ging, pro­vi­ding rough mea­sure of its interior’s resources, then its lack of them.

The exhaus­ted per­son is “used up,” but can’t ever be seen as that, only as what is poten­tial­ly (like eve­ryone else and pro­ba­bly eve­ry­thing else in the ins­tru­men­ta­li­zed world) used. The “used up” most­ly belongs to sub­stances or objects that can be or com­mon­ly are contai­ned, and it is most­ly in rela­tion­ship to their contai­ner that what can be used up becomes legible as use-up-able. Probably a thing that can be “used up” can’t be consi­de­red actual­ly used until it is gone enti­re­ly, and maybe this is because a thing that can be “used up” is often a thing with a use that is reco­gni­za­bly meta­bo­lic, like food or soap or gaso­line. The inter­ior of the com­post bar­rel stays dark.

The exhaus­ted look exhaus­ted because they aren’t trying, even if what they are exhaus­ted from is all that trying. “You look exhaus­ted,” we might say to the exhaus­ted only when we remem­ber them as once vital, noti­cing the alte­ra­tion only through com­pa­ri­son, mea­ning you once loo­ked okay but now you look gaunt, you have circles under your eyes, your face is puf­fy or your fea­tures defor­med, you drag and do not spring, you seem to hold your head above your shoul­ders with the grea­test effort, what you say is not too lucid, you fly off the handle in rage, you cry too easi­ly, your words come out jum­bled, you cry and say “I’m tired” and say “I’m exhaus­ted” and you cry because you are so tired.

An exhaus­ted per­son, trying to look less so, will try, as trying is what she is good at. She will put concea­ler under her eyes, add blush to her cheeks, do all the tricks the maga­zines and web­sites tell her will make her look less exhaus­ted : curl her eye­lashes up so that her eye­lids might droop less, drink cof­fee, take Adderall, exer­cise, rea­lize it is Tuesday, then that it is Friday, then that it is the end of the month, then that it is the begin­ning, then that time has rushed for­ward without her, car­rying with it her to-do list but lea­ving her behind.