I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
After having major surgery yesterday, I am tired. So why not share some writing from Byung-Chul Han, explicating Peter Handke’s “Essay on Tiredness.”
In The Burnout Society, Han writes:
Tiredness in achievement society is solitary tiredness; it has a separating and isolating effect. Peter Handke, in “Essay on Tiredness,” calls it “divisive tiredness”: “already the two… were irresistibly recoiling, each into… private tiredness, not ours, but mine over here and yours over there”. This divisive tiredness strikes one “mute and blind.” …
Handke sets eloquent, seeing, reconciliatory tiredness in opposition to speechless, sightless, divisive tiredness. As “more of less of me”, the first tiredness opens a between by loosening the strictures of the ego. I do not just see the Other; rather, I also am the Other, and “[t]he Other becomes I”, too. The between is a space of friendliness-as-indifference, where “no one and nothing dominates or commands”. As the I grows smaller, the gravity of being shifts from the ego to the world. It is “tiredness that trusts in the world”, whereas I-tiredness—”solitary tiredness”—is worldless, world-destroying tiredness. The trusting tiredness “opens” the I and “makes room” for the world. It reestablishes the “duality” that solitary tiredness destroys utterly. One sees, and one is seen. One touches, and one is touched: “tiredness as a becoming-accessible, as the possibility of being touched and of being able to touch in turn”. It makes lingering, abidance, possible in the first place. Less I means more world: “Now tiredness was my friend. I was back in the world again.”
Is it I-tired or we-tired to be tired after surgery? I think it is we-tired. I am not tired from overexerting myself towards achieving for myself and myself alone; I’m not tired in a way that cuts me off from others. I’m tired because I am taking care of my health so that I will, ideally, be around for many more years, to love and be loved. That’s why we’re here, after all.
More from Han:
Such “fundamental tiredness” brings together all the forms of existence and coexistence that vanish in the course of absolutized activity. However, it hardly amounts to a state of exhaustion in which one proves unable to do anything. Instead, it represents a singular capacity: “Fundamental tiredness” inspires. It allows spirit/intellect [Geist] to emerge. Thereby, the “inspiration of tiredness” involves not-doing.
Surgery under general anesthetic is one of the most complete not-doing one can engage in. I recall the nurse saying she was giving me Versed. And then the next thing I was aware of was worrying about oil prices going up and down, and how I was somehow to blame for that. I heard someone say, “she’s coming to,” and I felt immediate extreme pain and discomfort, which I complained about loudly.
“We’re giving you a muscle relaxant,” someone said and gradually I remembered what had happened.
My tiredness was the we-tiredness of humans undergoing surgery, humans being cared for by other humans, fortunately those other humans are expert in what they do.
Now today I sit in my bed with my cat on my lap and my overbed table with my medication and my laptop, an ice pack on the most painful of the five small incisions that were made for the robot surgery arms and fingers to enter my body and cut me up. I am tired. I am fundamentally tired. I am tired in a way that Spirit can emerge. I am doing — I am writing this blog post — but I am also not-doing. I am not going to garden today or clean my house or run errands. I am not going to socialize. I am not going to go on a long walk with my dog (he is being boarded). I am mostly just going to be tired.