Aimlessness, by Tom Lutz (An Introduction and The Essay)

Aimlessness Tom Lutz

Aimlessness An Introduction

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imlessness is a refutation. Like lovelessness or homelessness, the word suggests a privation, a lack. But it has an added resonance: love and home are positive, and their lack negative; but aim is trickier. To be aimless can mean to be lost, to have no direction, but it can also mean to be open, unhurried, unconniving, nonviolent; to be aimless is to have nobody in your sights, to have no target: to be ingenuous, guileless. It suggests a disinterest in or even resistance to stratagems, productivity, or efficiency. It can mean wanton, and some of us like to be wanton. It can suggest drifting, and some of us like to drift. Aimlessness—­in art, in life, in writing, in thought, in being—­is always more than the lack it names.

Aimlessness and Literature I The Essay

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he stray dog, the feral cat.

At least since Montaigne, the essay has been a literary form that embraces aimlessness, the form that best captures and regularly celebrates aimlessness as essence, as the opposite of deficiency, that finds in aimlessness not lack but plentitude, bounty, abundance. The essay lets aimlessness rule, lets aimlessness direct the proceedings.

Essays can, occasionally, follow the kind of linear synaptic progress common to narrative and argument, but the best essays digress and digress and swerve and circle before returning to digress again—­such essays follow Vico’s historiographical approach rather than von Ranke’s or Hegel’s.

As Sara Levine writes, ‘The essay is like a coat of fur, or Proteus in chains, or a syllable-­filled spirit, and has more in common with the German cockroach than the Tennessee snail darter.’ Like that description, it is a form that embraces weirdness and randomness and multiplicity, a

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form that enacts aimlessness, and in fact elevates it to a method. Aimlessness is the essayist’s method.

‘The essay,’ as Levine puts it, ‘is like a journey they say, or a walkabout, or a loose sally of the mind.’ As a form, it makes its living by pretending to be a mind thinking, by pretending to represent a mind sallying, which is to say, a mind at work, and this is, of course, like any representation, a bit schematic, incomplete, even, we might say, a bit sketchy in both senses of the word: a flawed simulacrum, a con job, and more often than not a poor, poor copy of its original. The sense that readers get when reading a great essay—­that we are watching its author think—­is quite easily produced with even the most rudimentary tools in any working essayist’s tool kit. All we need do, we essayists, is express a bit of doubt about what we’ve just said, wonder out loud, as it were (since it isn’t out loud at all, but on the page), whether what we just said is true, suggest that we don’t know what we are doing, and do it with sentences built using long strings of phrases and clauses and parentheticals, all commenting on, revising, and even reversing what we just said, and all of which suggest a stream of consciousness, a thought process, rather than a polished presentation.

But wait, why am I telling you this?

▶▹▶ You see how easy it is? I pretend to have a new thought, I pretend to do it in real time, as if in conversation with you, my reader, slipping in the second person quietly—­no matter that, for instance, I wrote the paragraphs that follow

Aimlessness and Literature I

first, and that I knew I was going to ask that question when I started down this road, knew that I was going to use that strategy to dupe you, whoever you are, long before it appeared on the page. And as I discuss these ruses of the essayist’s trade, explain how the trick is produced, show you the false back of the box that allows the magician’s assistant to disappear, I’m reminded—­ ‘I’m reminded,’ doing the same work again—­of a story about Thomas ­Edison, a shaggy dog story about how Edison finally, after endless trial and error, found the right material for his filament. Edison’s dog, in the story, watching his master fail time after time to make his light bulb last more than a couple of minutes, takes pity on him and says: ‘tungsten.’

The dog explains, to Edison’s gaping mouth, that, yes, dogs can talk, but there is a pact among them to never let humans know; they have agreed to pretend humans are smarter so we continue to buy the food and build the houses and pay the vet bills. If they knew I was talking to you, the dog says, they would kill me. Another dog overhears, and, yes, they kill him. I will now be looking over my shoulder at writers’ conferences.

You notice, too, the spiral of time, from the time of my writing, to the time of your reading, to the time of my reading about the shaggy dog, to the time in the story, to the ‘present’ again, to the future. . . . ​

▶▹▶ And what of the stray dog and the feral cat? Why do they go where they go? What propels them? Hunger? Fear?

Do they go to the same places, over and over, or do they

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Aimlessness and Literature I

wander? Are they aimless creatures, or, in their own minds, do they know exactly what they are doing and why, and feel, to themselves, like perfect utilitarians on their appointed rounds? We have seen them twice now—­will we see them again?

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j Andrei Codrescu, poet and author of So Recently Rent a World

“Lutz is an explorer, a tinkerer, a connoisseur, a peripatetic scholar, a prodigious reader, and a beguiling writer. His Aimlessness invites us to ask how, when, and above all why we set goals for ourselves and why perhaps we sometimes ought not to.”

Aimlessness Aimlessness

“Rarely does one encounter such sudden pleasures in ideas, and when one does it is instant, like meeting the eyes of a particular person on a stroll or in a coffeehouse, and then being in love for the rest of the day or even life.

The vagabond reader and the louche essay let each other dream of one another, without censors, without guilt.”

Lutz

Aimlessness collects ideas and stories from around the world that value indirection, wandering, getting lost, waiting, meandering, lingering, sitting, laying about, daydreaming, and other ways to be open to possibility, chaos, and multiplicity. Tom Lutz considers aimlessness as a fundamental human proclivity and method, one that has been vilified by modern industrial societies but celebrated by many religious traditions, philosophers, writers, and artists.

j David Wittenberg, author of Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative

Tom Lutz is the founding editor and publisher of the Los Angeles Review of Books and Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California at Riverside. His many books include Born Slippy: A Novel (2020) and Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums (2008), which won the American Book Award.

Cover design: Lisa Hamm

Columbia University Press/New York cup.columbia.edu PR I NT E D I N T H E U.S. A .

$19.95 ISBN: 978-0-231-19935-3

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Tom Lutz