It’s seven on a Saturday, and after two or three hours of trying, I’ve finally managed to get a good mope going. There’s no experience so aesthetically palpable as a real good mope -- lying back on the velvet fainting couch you lifted off the sidewalk, hand across your forehead, hastily cobbled-together sidecar lilting dangerously as your stomach rises and falls with your sighs. These past few years I’ve dedicated significant portions of my life to perfecting the art of moping around, and through this exercise I’ve achieved a level of zen-like ennui which would surely be the envy of many a great sage and holy man.
The first thing to understand is that moping is by no means a passive activity. Of course, it bears all the standard hallmarks of passivity -- slackened jaw, listless eyes, the creeping sense that somewhere in the room “The Great Gig in the Sky” (1973) is playing a little too quietly to hear. But these exterior signifiers are only a deception, pawns in a larger game the rules of which are as abstruse as they are vital to the human condition. To mope is to align oneself on the idea -- no, cosmic ley line -- of “why bother,” and this requires conscious effort, or to put it bluntly, sacrifice. A true-blue moper can’t be easily rousted from their perch by roommates bearing promises of Easy Mac and old Bruce Lee movies -- oh no. They are resolute, dignified, unresponsive to the extravagant tableaux of love and lust which subsumes your average dormitory.
If my words have moved you to despair, dear reader, of your ever achieving such a sublime and chartreuse state of being, then congratulations: You’re on the right track. Giving up is the key to moping, but one cannot give up on giving up; one must actively will one’s own undoing, to submerge themselves in the pure Atman of being. Because this is the secret key to moping -- it is not a state of relaxation, but a state of extreme distress. Just as Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha unites his soul with a dead jackal as it "lay on the banks, got bloated, stank, decayed, was dismembered by hyaenas, was skinned by vultures, turned into a skeleton, turned to dust, was blown across the fields,” so is moping an endless reeling from place to place. Consciousness impinges on the universe inexorably; to live is to be awash in sensuous experience, bombarded like yellowcake uranium with whizzing particulate qualia. Moping is not the abridgment or cessation of these qualia -- that would be death -- but their negation, the denial of their power over one’s perspective. To mope is to shut one’s curtains to the universe and to hold at a distance that which you hold most dear.
The Starving Aesthete: The art of moping, the art of despair
