Young Men, Time, and Boredom in the Republic of Georgia

Introduction

INTRODUCTION A thousand butterflies. Emil and I go to the beach. Cafés are being set up, including Bari White and Sector 31. We meet Giorgi. He and Elena broke up some weeks ago, and he seems to be burying himself in his work preparing Bari White—this summer he will be head bartender. Knowing that he won’t get a job at Sector 31 this year, Emil tries to persuade Giorgi to hire him as a bartender at Bari White. He spends most of his time helping Giorgi with the preparations, probably to show his willingness to work. They go to a market for supplies while I go next door to Sector 31. The end of my fieldwork is approaching, summer is coming, and holiday workers from Tbilisi are slowly returning. Among them is Gio, the bartender from Sector 31 who had joked that all young people in Batumi do during winter is “jerk off and blow their noses.” He got married during the winter, and his wife has come with him to Batumi. Besides Gio and his wife, a few Tbilisi holiday workers I met last summer are also there. We sit and talk. In the late hours, as warm winds blow in from the sea, sitting in the bar seems like an echo of the previous season. Gio’s wife discovers a butterfly perched underneath the bar. “It is getting ready to die,” she says and takes it in her hand. We discuss whether its still fluttering wings have changed anything. The pace in the city was picking up and, with summer returning, a cycle seemed to be closing. But it was not a repetition of the previous year. Much had happened; much was different. The winter season had been long, with dragging days and constant rain, but there had been much more than mere nose blowing and jerking off. In the midst of a seeming inertia, individual desires, dreams, and aspirations had played out, both alongside and against larger and often dramatic societal changes. 166 • SecTIon IV Why, then, was Batumi so boring? or, to put it differently, why did my informants perceive their lives as being so boring that it was pointless for someone like me to study them? Why would life lived among dramatic social changes be characterized by boredom? In an article on an Australian aboriginal settlement, Yasmine Musharbash notes that boredom arises when values and circumstances fail to correspond, when ways of being in the world and the world itself conflict. Boredom, she writes, is created out of “meaningless fits” (Musharbash 2007: 315). In Batumi, boredom was spoken of as an aspect of the “dark side” and a result of having few, if any, possibilities—a mismatch, perhaps, between life on the dark side and life in the surrounding world, the world of “King Fountain the First.” Getting to know this dark side of Batumi was an invitation to me from emil, an invitation to see what life was like for young people like him. As shown in the preceding chapters, daily life on this dark side was not a matter of complete inactivity. choices were constantly made, aspects of and occurrences in one’s surroundings were continually taken into account. This was a place for balancing on tightropes, where one false move could be fatal, where one joint smoked at the wrong time could make the house of cards collapse. Furthermore, time did not just pass but was created by others in narratives and images of past and future; it lingered, and it was thought about. Life was not just a question of muddling through; it was animated by individual dreams and desires, a wish that the fluttering of one’s wings would somehow bring about change before it was too late. The preceding chapters have, in different ways, explored how time appears in social life as a form of haunting or as an apparition in everyday life. In this final section, I consider a different kind of apparition—namely, what has appeared in these chapters in terms of analysis. In chapter 1, I posed a series of questions: What characterizes a situation of growing up in a society of social and material ruins? How can we approach it, and what does it tell us? Drawing on Sections I through III, Section IV considers these questions. In chapter 8, I answer them in relation to two main themes— social afterlives and temporal margins—and return to the theoretical notions of ruination...