The importance of useless doing

During the most acute moments of the pandemic, I cooked a lot, making old and sometimes new recipes. I was impelled to bake a cake, for example, almost as a necessity, an impulse that needed to take place. Of course, tasting the cake was (is) delicious, but I realize that it gave me meaning, it had a therapeutic, almost curative function, as if I didn't even need to eat the cake after it was ready. Era a doing based on the process of doing, of creating, much less than on the result.

I am referring here to something that takes shape without relying on an eventual utility, on a result, that is, something that is not linked to productivity, as was so widely advocated during the pandemic (taking advantage of time, taking courses, learning new things, etc.). This is something that goes against the grain of the time is money, of a doing whose specific motivation we cannot say clearly, it appears in a vague, almost mysterious way. We do it without really knowing why we do it, we do it because we need to do it, sometimes even without knowing where we are going to go.

An intriguing element of this doing is that it seems to put us in a very peculiar state, another state, from which we can take great advantage. I speak of a state in which we are neither in wakefulness nor in dream, we are as if suspended on the threshold between what is awake and what is asleep, in between, in fantasy . I see now that it can be a kind of active rest.

Thinking about this brings me to Freud's famous text The poet and fantasizing , from 1908, in which he makes a parallel between poetic activity and children's play, saying that the child, when playing, behaves like the poet, creating his own world. Freud also compares the poet to the daydreamer, and artistic creation to the daydream, the daydream (which brings me precisely to the in-between to which I referred earlier). Thus, the literary, artistic creations would be "(...) a continuation and a substitution, at the same time, of children's games (p. 63, in the edition of Autentica).".

Freud unfolds a series of other aspects of poetic making in this text, but what I want to draw attention to here is the childish element, because, it seems to me, this doing that I am talking about today, children do it with mastery. They play without knowing why (or knowing very well), they enter into make-believe and there they stay, surrendered, unconcerned with results or productivity. Play is the end in itself. In this sense, Manoel de Barros reminds us:

A poetic word has to reach the level of a toy to be serious.

In a text from 1966, entitled Living creatively , also dealing with something that comes close to Freud's object in the text cited above, Winnicott states that:

Somewhere in the scheme of things there may be room for someone to live creatively. This involves preserving something personal, perhaps something secret, which is unmistakably yourself (p. 48).

In the midst of the hurried life, of demand for productivity, may it be possible to be less adult, more child, more Manoel. That it is possible to find our doing, to make our toys and, who knows, in the useless, also to find something very ours, very intimate, that allows us to breathe and even rest.