In Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853), the eponymous protagonist is an employee at a mundane administrative office, and one day starts to say “I would prefer not to” when presented a new assignment; he instantly grows a penchant for this phrase, and begins using it for every aspect of his life, neutralising all accordance of consciousness in a sort of Zen-surge, until he is found spending his weekends at the office, in a corner staring at a wall 3 ft. away. The story can be interpreted in many ways: as a pre-Kafkian parable on the absurdity of modernism; as Buddhist attained detachment; and more contemporarily, as signs of clinical depression.
On Match.com, a stupid dating website that has yielded no results (my summary being “disappointed narcissist seeks unconditional love and ride to mum’s house”), the account holder is asked for their income, but given the option to “rather not say”; modesty or shame aside, this Bartleby-esque euphemism for evasion is conspicuous—and let’s suppose that a man who would “rather not say” will be met by the same fate as Bartleby, namely, spending his weekends in a corner staring at a wall.
Man, fuck this patriarch culture, until it’s time to pay for dinner, am I right fellas? Obtained (above) from Match.com’s stat-heavy blog, men with a higher reported salary get more unsolicited messages from women than men with low reported salary (though you will notice minor deviations before age 23, perhaps a mark of more idealist and non-fiscal times). It’s endearing how the colors reflect traffic light models: green is go, yellow is wait, red is no. The staunch column “no” for men making 20 – 30K reflects a kind of courtship red-tape, a bureaucracy of the heart. Either that or canned beans on toast is not romantic.
If Melville is to be a signpost for this, one easily thinks of Moby-Dick (1851), a story of dismal conquests and obsession, of impossibilities made real in a delusional mind (sounds like trying to getting a girlfriend with one leg missing; methinks Ahab would hesitate at the castration analogy).
Earlier this year, newly single again, I started a Match.com account out of a mixture of optimism and despair, the latter towards which I’m steadily rambling about. The income diagram looks like a highly pixilated image zoomed in at 1200%. Squint at it long enough and it begins to bear resemblance to, well, nothing. Mix salt, sugar, and heroine in a bowl and you have entropy. Pour two glasses of wine and you have an ideal set-up for a date—depending if she shows up. I hear the universe is expanding; my prostrate is contracting. Love is hard, finding love is harder, all the single people are thrown in a lake of uncertainty and expired condoms. I chose to “rather not say” what my income is. However understandably relevant, it just feels flippant—but based on my young age and freelance income added with my retail income, it’s fair to say that the ladies have decided to wait.
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