Distraction and Digression

Of late I too often opt for distraction, an experience I think opposed to the more productive practice of digression. Distraction directs me away from a present activity or state of awareness for a brief or longer period of time. The distraction might momentarily relieve a tension I am experiencing in an activity in which I am presently engaged by pulling me out of the engagement and into some mostly irrelevant event. I admit that in these times we need to be distracted, but here I am writing about mostly me. One danger of distraction is that it often leads me to the kitchen searching the refrigerator or stuffing my hand in the cookie jar. For good reasons I prefer to keep the latter empty and the former uncluttered, but the flesh is weak . . . and to alleviate my guilt I hand-bake the sweets. Not that it takes too much effort (though the clean-up is a bother—I am a careless cook); recently I have succumbed to purchasing King Arthur Flour boxed mixes: add eggs, milk, butter and vanilla, mix well, and for scones plop eight rounded portions on a prepared baking sheet and bake. For muffins I simply add the mixture into well-oiled muffin tins. I enjoy even this semi-prepared method; though still requiring clean-up, the distraction of baking and eating does give me pleasure and relief.

I have been, of late, drawn in distractibility too often to the smart phone where there are so many rabbit holes to fall into (oh, the places you go!), and to streaming shows from the computer onto a 32” external monitor screen, and to the reading of different novels, one in the mornings (Middlemarch and at present, Daniel Deronda) and another, at present, The Good Soldier, in the afternoons. But those aren’t so much distractions as engagements. I had startedLonesome Dove for the afternoons but found it, well, characterless despite the full cast of characters. I didn’t value the narrative style: declarative without much insight into character: basically a flat account. In McMurtry’s novel the character is defined by the omniscient narrator and not by the complex consciousness of the character; indeed, there is there almost no entrance into the operations of any character’s consciousness. The narrator tells what each character thinks but doesn’t show any character thinking! Didn’t much care. The reading was not much distraction, and I put the book (all 855 pages) away with a thud. But in these times I’ve chosen distraction too often.

So, I am here writing now and distract myself thinking about distractions and digressions. Politics is all about me these days and I am not at peace. (I have just deleted 107 email messages cluttering my junk mail folder: every Democrat in the country asking me for financial assistance, some of them asking multiple times. I am certain that f I gave to each I would be broke!) I need distraction and turn to the streams. I am repulsed and alarmed by the vituperative rhetoric of the Republican party and yet am appallingly drawn to their verbal garbage perhaps in some perverted interest. There is always the Big Lie and the name-calling. Latest news comes from North Carolina and Mark Robinson who proudly claims he is a black Nazi and has advocated a return to slavery! He boasted that he would own a few himself. And there is yet the absurd and dangerous accusation that Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. Whew! These politicians cheapen the electoral process in their discourse and pollute the environment with their lies and insults. I have given up any careful reading of the newspapers—no distraction there and no room for digression—except occasionally in the arts and leisure sections (too laden with reports about award ceremonies and red-carpet outfits in which I have little to no interest. I don’t care), and on the obituary .pages. If I’m not there I know I’m not dead, so I can eat a good breakfast and go back to bed. When I awaken, I pick up the nearby novel or turn to the shows streaming or to the relevant novel, depending on the exact time of day. Napping is a steady activity—or non-activity, so to speak. But often, I think, those naps are also a distraction! There are other anxieties from which I would flee. Distraction consumes not an inconsiderable part much of my day and does not yield much satisfaction despite the depleted contents of the cookie jar. At first, I considered that the present distractions were in the service of avoiding the work of writing, but ironically, writing is what I am engaged in now writing about distraction. I am considering that the distractions were simply an attempt to avoid deep thinking!  My Freud teaches me that the distractions serve as screen for something else and serve purpose for something other than mere avoidance, though, of course, it does serve that purpose very well. Perhaps. Maybe there is a larger project that I am avoiding: there sits 90 pages of something on the computer, a project begun three years ago and to which I return occasionally and briefly! And then there is the politics and always the omnipresent anxieties.

Digression seems to me to serve as an integral part and saving grace in the exercise of the day. I would invite more digression which nourishes me. Digression seems to open paths from the one on which I presently travel. Digression is how you sometimes have to go a long way out of your way in order to come back a short distance directly. (And who could have imagined that in this writing I would paraphrase Jerry in Edward Albee’s “The Zoo Story,” a play that I had studied for my high school senior thesis on the Theater of the Absurd. Then, I saw a production of the play then at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village when tickets were five dollars and on occasion rats ran across the stage.) Tristram Shandy writes “That tho’ my digressions are all fair,—as you observe,—and that I fly off from what I am about, as far and often too as any writer in Great Britain; yet I constantly take care to order affairs, so that my main business does not stand still in my absence.” I think that these digressions are versions of the stories Newspaper narrates to her listeners in James McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. Her listeners don’t want just the facts: rather, they urge her to put in some pop and scoop and story it up! Without the digressions the linearity of it all becomes deadening. It is all contextless facts. If we stick blindingly to the path before us, well then, there is a great deal in the brushes off the path we would not know about. Digressions are productive. Listen to Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant Massacree or his “The Ballad of Ruben Clamzo” for the benefits and joy of digression. I don’t always know what might be discovered in the off-path journeys of digression, nor who I might be when I return from those digressive wanderings I take. Digression provides context to a text and deepens meaning. Digression is the pop and scoop Newspaper adds to her narratives. 

 

Of cats and dogs

I’ve been thinking a great deal about the nature of a story’s narrator. Or course, quite everything becomes a story told, though some might pretend what they narrate is just fact and the truth. But even a complex fact lacks context which a story provides. But someone must narrate that story even if just to themselves and and that narration derives from a particular time, place, psychology and motive. Now, Freud refers to the daily lives in which we engage as the dream day, and that from these activities—the dream day—the dream work draws material into a narrative structure to construct the dream. Freud says that the “The dream work . . . does not think, calculate, or judge in any way at all; it restricts itself to giving things a new form.” That is, the dream work creates stories from the raw materials of the day and though many might say that we are more than our stories, ironically, we would not know that until we tell the story. In our waking life we story the dream-story. We narrate our lives; the character of the narrator determines the story that becomes definitive but finally, it is just a story after all.  The narrator of José Saramajo’s novel, Blindness, says, “All stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.” We tell the story so that we know what happened and what we think about what happened, but until we narrate the story, we don’t know what happened or even what we think!

In James McBride’s novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, Newspaper, whose nickname is Paper, narrates the news to the community that cannot (or will not) read. But her listeners insist that she make the news be a story. One of her audience, Rusty, says to Paper, “C’mon Paper . . . story it up like you know how. Put a little pop in it, a little scoop.” Why should she do so, Paper asks Rusty, and he answers, “’Cause if you tell it any other way, it’ll sound like a lie.” Unless there is a story all that can be had is the facts, and the facts are empty and meaningless without the context from which they were first embedded and from which they were drawn. We demand context for sense and meaning, and the narration of that context provides the story. The Stage Manager in Wilder’s Our Town says, “In our town we like to know the facts about everybody,” but though the play displays the facts, that is not what the play depicts: it is the lives that Emily comes to understand as imperfect without the story. Emily says, “They don’t understand much, do they? . . . That’s all human beings are!—Just blind people.” To see only the facts is to miss life. Thus, we narrate, and “story it up . . . put a little pop in it, a little scoop.” We can always tell the story.

Engaged in daily life we have a tendency not to think very much about it: mostly people go through their diurnal existences attending to the facts. Consumed in the immediacy of experience we lack context and do not narrate, but even the slightest distance offers space for the story, and the story happens when we connect up the facts that make up our daily life. Wilder’s Emily is correct: attending to the facts the citizens of Grovers Corners don’t know anything. But the play, Wilder’s story, Our Town, well, it knows. So is it in Ann Patchett’s novel Tom Lake. Emily narrates to her adult daughters the story of her summer affair with the soon-to-be television and movie star, Peter Duke, a passionate affair that had ended when Duke had taken up with the actor who had replaced Emily in the play and in life when Emily’s Achilles heel had become torn. In modern parlance, Duke had ghosted Emily: he had stopped all communication with her. Hearing this story, Emily’s daughter, Maisie, responds to Duke’s behavior with anger, but about herself Emily says, “The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story.” She has narrated that story to her daughters. At the end of the day (and even of a life) the story tells what it all might have meant. But really it is all a story. In The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store at the livery stable “somebody’s up late and talking.” They are telling a story. And Ann Patchett’s Emily, who had also played Emily in Our Town in high school, college, and summer stock, is correct: all we ever have is the story. The facts are meaningless until they inspire the story. We define ourselves by the stories we narrate. Fatty, in McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, had learned that the Nate Timblin he has come to now known was not the same Nate Timblin who had served time in prison. “Rather, he was a story, a wisp, a legend, a force, a fright.” I think the same might be said of us all.  We know others from the stories they tell. We narrate and we hear narration: the character of the narrator is central. What story do they tell, how is the story told, and what sense generates the story. Answering these questions tells us about the narrator.

All this is a too-long prologue (and story) concerning one of Trump’s comments in the recent Presidential debate. In his story-telling Trump accused immigrants of invading—our cities and eating our cats and dogs! Invading, as if at war and by this story turning the white citizenry into endangered victims similar to the beleaguered citizens of Ukraine and Gaza. Trump said, "In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there." City officials in Springfield responded saying that there was no credibility to the accusation. It is difficult to discount the absurdity of Trump’s story here . . . but the character of the narrator of this tale is the point here. The story that Trump has narrated is a blatant lie that he has intended to pass off as truth. In fact, he has no facts and context to validate his story; he has made up everything. one has to wonder about his motive. Does he really believe his lie, which might suggest he is delusional, or is his story meant to inspire hatred and violence. Trump’s narrative characterizes him as a liar, a racist, a hate-monger. But I mclaim that Trump is the story he narrates: like Nate Timblin, certainly a fragment, but as Trump, he is a dangerous legend, a deadly force and a nightmarish fright. This narrator can at best be described as unreliable, and the stories he tells are ugly, dangerous and destructive. 

 

 

Post-Labor Day

Labor Day has long been considered the end of summer though there is usually two or three weeks before the equinox. School usually began the Tuesday after Labor Day: I had spent a good portion of my life in school. In Fall, apples began to appear on the shelves and I make apple crisps, cobblers and crumbles; winter clothes came out of storage and I was permitted again to wear my beloved corduroys. On the radio reports on fall colors become part of every newscast and people would plan drives into the places to best view the dying leaves. Thoreau suggests that Fall leaves teach us how to die: in blazing colors! Alas, too many of my shirts are blue and gray.

Another experience that I have come now, having lived for thirty-five years in the mid-west, to associate with the advent of Fall is the quite busy appearance of bees and spiders. Each day I discover bees swarming on my apartment deck, and my windowsills are threaded with spider webs every morning. I am not fond of bees: in their own behalf they sting adversaries like me.  On the floor at the bottom runner on my patio door is an overrun mortuary of executed bees who had ventured uninvited into my domain. Neither am I very friendly with spiders: I have had two memorable frightening confrontations with arachnids. In the crispy mornings from the windows where the spiders have woven their willowy traps, I sweep away the webs that are attached to glass and screen. When my daughters were younger, we watched Charlotte’s Web too many times. I recall Charlotte telling Wilbur that in the webs she would catch her meals and wrap them up so to keep them fresh. In the wispy webs on my windowsills there are no packaged repasts, and I wonder if the spiders just continue to spin their webs out there out of a certain rebelliousness. Spinoza says that the free man thinks least of all of his death. Maybe the spiders are spinozists. Alas, I am not so free

. . . or that wise. Nature has its order but to me who has not discerned that order think that every season has its clutter: in the Fall my windows are covered with spider webs, and every day I sweep these webs from my windows though I rarely see the active weaver. in the Spring I wait to wash my windows until the cottonwood trees have stopped their shedding: the feathery floating white tufts of seeds clog my screens and the view out of the windows is obstructed. The cottony tufts float through the air and fall like snow; in late June the sharp green grass is covered as if with winter’s snow. Summer storms blow down trees and flood the streets and rivers. Winter has meant frigid cold and snow drifts through which I cannot walk. Now I avoid winter and escape to a warmer climate.

The Fall leaves fall in the times of their dyings and like the bees in the patio door window-runners or the spider’s lairs in my windowsills they cover the surface. But the trees from which they fall remain and will issue forth green leaves in some months’ time. The bees will die and others will somehow maintain the hive with resources they have produced from their Spring and summer honey stores. Life goes on.

I know the Spring will come again and I do love the colors of Fall, the crispness of the morning air and the donning my corduroy pants. And there is some stark beauty in the bare trees whose branches will be soon blanketed in snow. There is some comfort in the hibernations of winter. But I don’t welcome the stark grayness of late Autumn and Winter. There is death all about: in the air empty of birds that have flown, on the naked tree branches and the white snow covering of the ground. As the snow falls I think of the closing lines of Joyce’s short story, “The Dead.” Thoreau saw life everywhere: Nature was his guide and source of strength. I have my books.

Labor Day has come and gone. I do not labor much these days