Monday, February 17, 2003

Some Notes For My Proposed History of Boredom In mucking around in 19th century case studies of insomniacs and madmen I've been thrilled to discover that what we now routinely diagnose as depression the old doctors just as frequently referred to as boredom, plain and simple. It certainly seems to be overlooked as an exacerbating factor or root cause in many of the more modern psychological maladies. I'm absolutely willing to admit that I'm bored out of my mind half the time (or maybe even more than that), and it occurs to me that boredom is one of the great and prevailing themes of literature, music, and film, either overtly, or through the sheer, unconscious muddle of much of the stuff. Boredom's really a lot like irony these days; a lot of those who are most infected with it or steeped in it don't even realize it. It's just the muddy stream they're swimming in, and all they've ever known. Crash and burn some time and end up in a treatment center somewhere and you'll quickly figure out that most addictions can be followed back to a couple basic launching pads: Love sucks. And: I am/was bored half to death. In Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, the protagonist, Charlie Citrine, sets out to write a history of boredom, but gets sidetracked. Not, however, before he offers up what still stands as a near perfect definition of the word: A kind of pain caused by unused powers, the pain of wasted possibilities or talents. Kierkegaard, in Either/Or, provides a handy enough thumbnail history: The Gods were bored, and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world and increased in proportion to the increase of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then the population of the world increased, and the people were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom gained the upper hand. Yankelovich Partners, a marketing research firm, recently did some sort of a survey on boredom that concluded, Just as a drug user develops a tolerance and needs larger doses to achieve the same effect, so too have we developed a tolerance to amazing events. Michael Raposa, in Boredom and the Religious Imagination, is also hardly reassuring: Even love cannot bannish boredom altogether. Some years ago the University of Chicago Press did publish a book on the subject, Patricia Meyer Spacks' Boredom: A Literary History of a State of Mind, but I haven't yet managed to round up a copy. It sounds boring, but I'll let you know when I get a chance to actually read it. Here are a couple links to stories that I've cribbed from (liberally). And, finally, there's this Reuters story that was making the rounds some months ago: Boring, Passive Work May Hasten Death: Study. Nothing terribly surprising really, but, still, it's something to think about when you're bored.   4:33:59 PM

An Eye Witness Account Of How I Spent My Saturday Afternoon I was just sitting here reading the paper and having a cup of coffee when I saw Mr. Zellar from next door out in his backyard in his pajamas and slippers. What he'd done was, he'd loaded a bunch of stuff --some boxes and piles of magazines and miscellaneous other items-- onto a blanket, and he was struggling to drag this blanket through the snow to the back alley. You could see plainly that this was no way to go about it, but he kept at it for quite some time. Every once in a while he'd get the blanket to budge a bit, but then things would start to topple off into the snow and he'd have to start all over again. It couldn't have been more than 20 or 30 feet to the alley, and I have no idea why he didn't just pick these items up individually and carry them to the garbage. Not to mention that it was the dead of winter and it was cold out there, and Zellar wasn't wearing a hat or gloves, and it was also clear that he was standing out there in bedroom slippers without any socks. I contemplated offering him a hand, or at the least asking for some explanation for his strange behavior, but the spectacle was so uncomfortable that I felt intervention would have added insult to injury. I watched him for quite some time, and near as I could tell he made absolutely no progress. I left the window for a moment to refill my coffee cup, and when I returned he was on his back in the yard, from the looks of things making snow angels.   What I Always Wanted To Be I always wanted to be the gun on the table in the first act. I always wanted to be the mysterious stranger arriving in an unfamiliar town with a sack full of magic corn. I always wanted to be the troll who lived under the bridge and the wise old man on the mountain. I always wanted to be the gingerbread castle that gets stepped on by a giant and eaten by the boy who was raised by wolves. I always wanted to be the voice in the croaking bog who sings the furthest into the damp morning. I always wanted to be the old woman who swallowed a fly. I always wanted to be the goat who spoke the plain, hard truth. I always wanted to be the key to the city that gets shoved in a box in the garage by the movie star the minute he gets home to Hollywood. I always wanted to be the road to riches or the road to ruin, depending on who was traveling along me. I always wanted to be the frosting on the cake and the writing on the wall and the message in the bottle and the goose who laid the golden egg. I always wanted to be the wind beneath your wings and the fish who saved Pittsburgh and the pot who called the kettle black. I always wanted to be the pen that carried you gamely down the page on a night when you had no words of your own.   The Things I Love The things I love remain ostensibly the same from year to year, objects of steady and enduring adoration and amusement, even as their number continues to expand incrementally: the woman I married, my dog, dogs in general, music in general --or, no, very particular music, occasionally peculiar music, but lots of it: Ornette Coleman, the Kinks, Thomas Tallis, Eddie Bo, James Brown, Henri Salvador, the Minutemen, the Five Royales, Buddy DeFranco, Sonny Clark, Hank Snow, Missy Elliot, Charley Patton, Schubert, Kid Ory, Don Cherry, James Luther Dickinson, Mildred Bailey, Atmosphere, Run DMC, Neil Young, Sam Cooke, Bobby Bland, etc.; Icelandic outlaw sagas, Walter Benjamin, Eudora Welty, Britt Robson, Robert Burton, random tales of gods and monsters, baseball statistics, baseball mitts, abstracted detritus, Kodachrome, Night of the Hunter, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, red licorice, Dots, suede Pumas, Mountain Dew, thrift stores, turntables, Touch of Evil, The Telephone Booth Indian, Ball Four, Beneath the Underdog, Stax records, Montana, old photographs, the diaries and letters of strangers, early funk, L'Atalante, road trips, Joseph Cornell, Flannery O'Connor, The Wind in the Willows, Levi Stubbs, Blue Note records, the Oxford unabridged dictionary, the Rolling Stones before they were old men with an unseemly willingness to remove their shirts, black pens, manual typewriters, the Middle Ages, Hardcore Dave, Jimmy Gaines, Dave Swirnoff, Tom Sullivan, MC Turtledove, 24-hour restaurants.... 3:50:11 PM

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