Meet Tom Lutz, and read an excerpt from "Aimlessness"
Interviewed by Diane Cyr
Editor’s note
It’s fair to say no motivational poster has ever promoted the virtues of aimlessness. But that might change if the world reads Tom Lutz’s latest book, Aimlessness, in which mental wandering is shown to be “a source of creativity and an alternative to the demand for linear, efficient … thinking,” according to Columbia University Press.
Lutz, a self-described layabout who chairs creative writing at University of California, Riverside, and publishes the Los Angeles Review of Books, has written frequently about topics overlooked in our achievement-oriented culture, including wandering, crying, and even doing nothing. His new book—as the title suggests—doglegs through literature, philosophy, and cultural studies to show readers that you don’t always need an emotional or intellectual map to get to wellbeing, happiness, or wherever else you’d like to go.
What’s the positive side of aimlessness?
My argument is that aimlessness is a kind of method, just as much as mathematics is a method, and as a method, it is good for many things. Math is better for balancing your checkbook, but aimless wandering is a much better way to bump into the unexpected than a package tour.
You’ve obviously done a lot of writing, research, and publishing while being a gadabout. What’s your personal formula for balancing aimlessness with productivity?
When I was building houses for a living, I had two modes--one in which I was deeply involved in the physicality of the work: swinging a hammer, watching the nail find its seam, feeling the sting in my bicep. And the other mode was the opposite: a complete abandonment of the moment, aimless daydreaming, and I would come out of my daydream to realize I had finished a section of wall or finished laying down flooring.
Both modes afforded a certain amount of pleasure, and pleasure is the key. Building things gives us pleasure. Building a sandcastle is a pleasure, building a wall is a pleasure, building a book is a pleasure. They all have their problems—you can get sand in your bathing suit, you can smash your thumb with the hammer, you can get stuck and frustrated in the middle of a chapter. But in each of those cases, a little aimlessness can help. Jump in the water and loll around until the sand is rinsed out. Walk out the door and wander wherever the breeze takes you and when you come back the problem is often magically solved.
I have often said that the secret to the productive life is procrastination. When I can’t seem to get interested in the project that is due on Tuesday, I find myself procrastinating by working on the project due Thursday, and if that gets boring, the project due on Wednesday. Productive procrastination, wandering from project to project, keeps them all fresh and gives them all the befit of the daydreams the other has engendered.
How might you personally connect the idea of aimlessness to meditation? Can it be used as a channel to “possibility, chaos, and multiplicity?”
Yes to the second question—I do believe that aimlessness is a multiplier. Does that lend itself to meditation? There is no tao but the tao, and that is like water. Pour a bucket of water on the ground and it goes any which way, uncontained and unrestrained, but as Lao Tzu says, it seeks the low ground, so even in its heedlessness to purpose, it finds where it is going.
Can aimlessness be applied to parenting? In what way?
The child knows aimlessness! My favorite memories of parenting are of the times I managed to stop what I was doing and get down on kid level, see the world with them, on their unperturbed schedule, and with their skill at make-believe, turning the world into a playground.
I think many parents look back and realize how much their children have taught them about what is important—hard not to sound like a cliché here, but it’s true: if we are fully human with them—which means learning as much as teaching, setting them free as much as giving them limits, and respecting the validity of their fantastic fictions, wandering around the world that they can enchant for us if we let them.
Does aimlessness have a place for those seeking a “purpose-filled life?” Can it provide a channel?
Ah, purpose—what is a purpose? When we cook a meal, is the purpose simply to fuel up to get through another day? No, it’s to amaze our tastebuds and the tastebuds of our friends and loved ones, to feel the pleasure of exercising our skills, to be in the rhythm of joyful labor. I think of aimlessness as a laboratory for expanding our notion of purpose beyond the simple utilitarian sense it is sometimes used, beyond even the ethical, virtuous sense it carries from its religious roots.
Aimlessness is a catalyst, an incitement. And not a channel, since that suggests a pre-ordained route—the channel is the route the boats follow when they are going from point A to point B, but the day-sailor who follows the wind, tacks back and forth to see the sights, and feels the sun doesn’t care where the channel is, as long as she avoids the shallows.
excerpt from aimlessness
Many of the famous self-declared loafers in history—Samuel Johnson and Jack Kerouac, for instance, Johnson signing his essays ‘The Idler’ and ‘The Rambler,’ Kerouac calling himself a ‘Dharma Bum’—turn out to be closet workaholics, Johnson writing a dictionary practically single-handed and Kerouac always anxious to get back to his typewriter. And some of the biggest promoters of the work ethic—Benjamin Franklin prominent among them—were closet slackers. Franklin was a proponent of a daily ‘air bath,’ aka a naked nap, which took up a good part of his afternoons. I’m not sure why this ever seemed surprising to me. Isn’t it always the case that the loudest declarations of innocence come from the guilty? As we know, every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints . . .
Whatever our slacker stories are doing for us, it isn’t representing reality. Slacker figures are fantasies of escape from a life dominated by work, but that doesn’t mean we want to stop working. Everyone loves Lebowski, but very few people want to be him. Some people do, of course, but most don’t, and even some of those who do go on to work on their golf game, work on their garden, work on a project in the garage, work as volunteers. Is that because we no longer know how to have free time, no longer know how to think outside the utilitarian, teleological cage? I don’t think so. I think that as a species we like to make things, we like to exercise whatever skills we have, we like to be engaged, and often that means being engaged in tasks, in work.
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Which is why the real loafer, when I see one—as opposed to the fictional loafer—can make me sad, and never make me laugh in the least.
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The opening scene of Ousmane Sembene’s Xala shows the new minister of commerce and his deputies sitting down to work. They wait while Europeans come in, hand them each a briefcase full of cash, and then leave. One deputy stands and gives a speech, which includes the words we must work together, and then reminds them of an upcoming wedding party, as one of their number is taking his third wife, and they call it a day and go home. A subplot has the ministers continually moving a group of starving and bedraggled beggars, some with missing limbs and visible diseases, away from their offices, and we watch the beggars drag themselves for miles, back from wherever the police drop them. In the end the ministers are deposed, and the final scene shows the group of beggars gleefully spitting on the disgraced corrupt politicians. It is a political version of a slacker comedy.
But there are real versions—whether it is a US President who plays golf more than he works as he enriches himself, or Robert Mugabe sucking the entirety of Zimbabwean wealth out of the country and sticking it in banks around the world, while not doing his job, doing nothing for his further and further impoverished citizens. These are not funny. And in Mugabe’s case—after the first twenty or thirty years, the first billions socked away—Why? Such aimless plunder! Why?
And Genghis Kahn, too, come to think of it: Why did he keep rampaging through land after land, many thousands of miles from home, at a time when it took a long day on a fresh horse to travel fifty on good ground. Isn’t there something indiscriminate about world domination, some aimless, uncontrollable lust for power? Some narcissistic aimlessness?
In any case, it is easy to see that the aimlessness of the rich is not the same as the aimlessness of the poor. The aimlessness of the powerless is not the same as the aimlessness of the powerful. Power corrupts, and it corrupts aimlessness absolutely.
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I write in bed. Right now, going over all this again, I am propped up by a batch of pillows, with my laptop atop my lap. I am, quite literally, a layabout. An intermittently aimless, intermittently industrious layabout. As I survey my tiny empire of words, each of the small chapters a bit of terrain, part of me wants to keep going, like Genghis Kahn, keep adding new territory, indulge my encyclopedic impulse—Why not add the sauntering Baudelaire or Thoreau? What about the sadhus, the sacred, naked wanderers of South Asia? And my own aimlessness? My years as a wandering cook and carpenter, my continual wandering through academic disciplines, my errant aim in all things? How do I manage to wear this as both honor and shame at the same time?