Emotion

And adolescence, in a word

The Pigs by Tim Carter

School is a little like life in that many people don’t want to be there. While school in America is very like America at large in that people don’t behave very well and they tend, in quite a few cases, to get shot.

Tim Carter is, in this strange book, interested in school. School life; the life of the mind, the heart, imprisoned in school. Interested in the things people do at school and feel at the end of adolescence, which uneasily becomes real life — if you’re not careful.

Looking back on adolescence, the most interesting thing to note is how everything at the time seemed so important and now it has no flavour. It’s all gone. The things that made us angry and delighted — that really seemed to matter to us — matter not at all even a handful of years later. They survive in vague ideas, inclinations. Judgements of people, places, things, films and books and music. And we don’t necessarily know the source even years later of some of our deepest seated ideas — our foundational and yet vaguest held ideals.

Carter’s book is about American education and it has the American educative tint. There are so many people getting shot — a triple homicide, what a pity — and the saturation of violence, the whole place dripping with it, is lost in a general turn and swirl of adolescent emotion. Who likes who. Who’s learning to live outside the self. Who’s struggling hard to become a self. Who doesn’t want a self very much, if it’s all the same to you.

Talking and shouting and gossiping and some sitting alone, quite alone, and not talking to anyone and vaguely doing nothing from educational boredom and sitting about and thinking of the worst thing that ever happened and then halting, backing away, because nothing that bad ever did happen and it’s wrong to speculate, wrong to think, disturbed to consider — that all that’s bad is coming, and rolling on ahead. That life is for some a becoming and others the aftermath of something that was once long, long ago.

Is existence just pain, differently expressed, as Carter quotes in his list of marginalia? Is life just poetry, differently expressed — generally worse? Does life have flavour and form? So many questions — and endless time to discuss them. Time not being short. Time not being short at all, in no way.

Endless days in all weather of sitting down bored and being vaguely made to hear and to listen. Nothing happening, nothing doing, the days endless, one after another, so many the same. Once you thought you could remember every dull day, the ill process of being educated, but now they are all subsumed, merged by force into grey mass en bloc. Time spent bored at tables, bored at desks, the only interest and distraction being the contents of other people’s talk. And talk of so much interest — talk of so much vitality. Did you hear? And what about — and that’s what he told me — and what did she mean when she said? All of it so important you ought to hear it now.

Someone drove in today and they want to tell you about the clowns on the roads before they settled down to read their vampire fantasy fiction before school begins. Could you believe all the clowns on the road today? You weren’t there but can you believe it?

All this aversion to, escape from, boredom. It’s not as if being bored without becoming homicidal is a useful skill for later life.

Today we use sensitive equipment to examine inert things and all the while, we have our first big emotions. Emotions we might be able to name if we were particularly sage and creative, but which we’ve no experience with to date, no benchmark, no dull context. It’s all new, all heavy. I might need to sit down a little like the boy in physics. The boy tricked into holding two weights aloft and still because he put his hand up when the teacher asked us all if there was anyone in the room who wanted to do no work for as long as he liked.

How many people dead in that recent shooting? So much about it on the news and online. It’s a pity; it really is a pity. There’s a lot of it about and it’s catching. There are so many sirens, in the distance most of all. Sirens everywhere — you may hear them in your sleep. Three dead — a triple homicide. Carter notes it.

Those things are the story of American adolescence. An endless succession of newish things deemed boring because they aren’t potent enough. A little subtraction now and then. The first introductions to life — its terrors, its pity. And the dullness, the chafing of authority, of routine, of being made to do things — an introduction to all that is piteous and wrong with modernity, with authority, with living on at all.

Carter appears to believe that adolescence is a fascinating time. He’s less sure, despite all the words, all the phrases, what he means to say. What big idea is here contained? Like a book report for a book unread, he risks wanting to tell the reader simply that growing up is a land of contrasts.