Ennui

Thousands of years ago - at the heart of the Roman empire - Latin was the tongue of the world. The Roman imperialist drive had lead to the colonisation of the majority of the globe as we know it today; "Civis Romanus sum" guaranteed your safety - allegedly - in any of the four corners of the world. The language was Latin, the dead language of our fore-bearers; a language which has moulded, shaped, and coiled our own mother-tongue for centuries since. You need look no further than commonplace words to find Latin derivations, and one word in particular surprisingly can be scanned back to our Latin cousins. Ennui.

Say that word (on-wee), and feel it caress your lips as it slides smoothly off your tongue. It is a word which has embedded itself firmly in the existentialist consciousness. It has compelled psychologists for decades, it fascinated its fiercest proponent - Jean Paul Sartre - and it laid the foundation for some of our most regular adjectives in contemporary society. Yet it you were to look the word up you would probably find a dictionary which lists synonyms such as 'boredom', 'tedium', 'mundane', and so on. We have lost the nuances in translation: ennui is no longer that feeling of listlessness, or unease and disquiet, the feeling of worry and of trouble; the physical manifestation of a quiet uncomfortableness with the world -- the gut reaction to emotional stimulus; our constant fear and concern. No, ennui simply means 'bored'. Well, friends, if you were to ask me where I have been - which I assume you are probably wondering - I would sum it up with the archaic use of ennui.

"Why are you here?"

I have been asked that question myriad times in the past few weeks: the emergency room, the counsellors, the university faculty office, the surgery, a park in the middle of the night, the beach in the middle of the day, a strip-club, and inside my own head. I have spent days wrestling with my own chronic wish to take my own life. I have enjoyed a drug-overdose, I have delved back into the world of debauchery and drugs; I have lain prone from an alcohol-induced coma, and have been revived only by my own crushing regret and remorse. Love has blossomed and died; friendships have wilted to nothing, and new ones have sprouted in the infertile wasteland of my social want. People have fallen by the wayside: birthdays have been forgotten, or remembered and discounted as frivolous distraction; they have blended seamlessly into the throng of the milling crown I cease to notice. Emotion has been void, ebullient; gone, alive, forbidden and accepted. I have people watched, studied psychogeography, attacked the situationists as intellectual dullards; conversed for hours with fellow elitists on what is to be done with the proletariat. I have planned vacations, and shot them down; before starting them afresh. I have discarded my university work as a mere annoyance, and regretted my decisions. I have dropped out of university and then changed my mind. I have been counselling, and to hospital. I've used, abused, accused. I've shouted, sworn, yelled myself hoarse. I've thrown, broken, smashed, punched, kicked, screamed, torn, rent, I've destroyed. I've cried, I've wept for hours on end. I've cut my wrists and I've taken pills. I've spent hundreds on nothing. I've fallen off the grid, I've reappeared. I've shaken myself into submission. I've hated, loathed with everything I have. I've hated you, your stupid life, my stupid life - our stupid lives.

It's been mental, I swear.

The most interesting thing that has happened to me, however, is the gradual building of that feeling of ennui. I seek détournement - diversion - and I become a flâneur. I void my bowels on the pavement, and throw myself down in despair on sidewalks in your mind. I inhabit your consciousness like a plague; festering in the gutters of your psyche.

That's where you can find me.