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.